USA > History > 2010 > Gun violence (II)

Ohio Court Limits

Power of Localities on Gun Laws

December 29, 2010
The New York Times
By BOB DRIEHAUS

CINCINNATI — The Ohio Supreme Court has upheld a 2006 law that prohibits cities and other local governments from enforcing ordinances that are more restrictive than state gun laws.

The City of Cleveland had challenged the statute in order to continue enforcing ordinances that officials said were tailored to fight urban gun violence, including registration of handguns, restrictions on children’s access to firearms and prohibitions on the possession or sale of assault weapons. Banning such ordinances would violate the state’s home-rule laws, the city argued.

But in a decision released Wednesday, the court upheld the statute, 5 to 2.

“Law-abiding gun owners would face a confusing patchwork of licensing requirements, possession restrictions and criminal penalties as they travel from one jurisdiction to another” without a uniform statute, according to the ruling, written by Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton.

Justice Paul E. Pfeifer dissented, arguing that the statute “infringes upon municipalities’ constitutional home-rule rights by preventing them from tailoring ordinances concerning the regulation of guns to local conditions.”

Robert J. Triozzi, Cleveland’s law director, who led the city’s lawsuit, said that gun owners would now be able to walk through a public square with rifles, handguns and assault weapons, and that safety rules for possession of guns near children would also be removed, endangering residents. Ohio bans some assault weapons, like sawed-off shotguns, but Cleveland banned a broader array.

“The inability to control guns in Cleveland, where large numbers of people live, work and gather in close proximity to one another, limits proactive strategies for protecting our community and puts all of us at greater risk,” said Marty Flask, Cleveland’s public safety director.

Mr. Triozzi said the broader implication of the decision was a shift in power toward state legislators and away from city councils.

“All the Legislature has to do is to declare that a given issue is their turf, and there will be no ability for municipalities to enact any meaningful legislation to make their situation better,” he said.

The ruling was hailed by the National Rifle Association, Ohioans for Concealed Carry and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, as well as Attorney General Richard Cordray, a Democrat, who lost his re-election bid in November to Mike DeWine.

Mr. Cordray said revisions to state gun laws in 2006 provided a comprehensive set of rights and responsibilities applicable throughout the state. “This is an important victory for every gun owner in Ohio,” he said.

    Ohio Court Limits Power of Localities on Gun Laws, NYT, 29.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/us/30ohio.html

With a Spike in Crime and Police Layoffs,

Anxiety Deepens in Newark

December 24, 2010
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

NEWARK — The violence that broke out on St. James Place here on Friday morning had a familiar ring.

A man and a woman — shot in their backs around 11 a.m. by a drive-by attacker in a stolen sport utility vehicle — ran into the J.& J. Deli Grocery at one corner. A month-old bullet hole could still be seen where someone had fired a gun at the deli’s window. A block away, a memorial of votive candles and whiskey bottles marked the site of a fatal shooting more than a week ago, residents said.

Even the police response on Friday to the attack, in which both victims were hospitalized but expected to survive, was workmanlike. Officers descended on the scene, collected their evidence, and by 12:30 p.m., they were gone, leaving only one visible clue that a shooting had occurred at all: a smear of blood on the deli’s bathroom door.

The police had their hands full. Nine people were shot, three of them fatally, in a 19-hour period beginning at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. The burst of violence claimed two 16-year-old boys and a 30-year-old man and deepened a nervousness that settled on this city at the end of last month when the city announced it was laying off 13 percent of its police force because of budget cuts.

On Friday afternoon, Keisha Best, the mother of one of the 16-year-old victims, gathered with relatives near the spot on Avon Avenue where her son Allen was fatally shot, and prayed.

“Something has to be done,” she said, sobbing. “It’s crazy out here.”

At a hastily arranged news conference at an empty City Hall, Mayor Cory A. Booker acknowledged the fear caused by the shootings and a recent spate of carjackings and robberies in the city. But he and his police director, Garry F. McCarthy, defiantly maintained that the police were responding to the problem.

“Everybody is angry about this,” the clearly frustrated mayor said, adding that he blamed the news media, in part, for furthering the perception that the layoffs caused what he acknowledged was a “very troubling crime trend.”

Mr. Booker said that over the holiday weekend there would be more police officers patrolling Newark’s streets than before the layoffs. He would not give an exact number, but said the number was “dozens” more.

“This weekend, we are at full force,” he said. “We will not let our city go back to where we were in 2006 and before.”

City officials say they have reduced crime in the city by 21 percent since 2006. But the latest statistics on the Web site of the Newark Police Department show a 7 percent increase in crime from last year, including a 4 percent increase in murders and a 13 percent increase in shootings. There were 75 murders in the city in 2009, and up to Dec. 12 of this year, the total was 78.

The police appear to be most vexed by a rash of recent robberies and carjackings, which they portray as a regional issue.

The victims during a stretch of at least six recent carjackings included a lieutenant for the state attorney general’s office and a Newark school principal. While police officials have said that the bloody narcotics trade was to blame for many of the murders, and argue that such violence is limited to certain parts of the city, the carjackings are harder to dismiss.

Mr. McCarthy said a carjacking task force, consisting of investigators with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and federal and local prosecutors, was formed this month and had already made important arrests, including of a man that the task force said was responsible for the carjacking of the principal. He said the carjackings were very likely the work of a “small group” of criminals.

Asked if he had enough officers to confront the problem facing the city, Mr. McCarthy suggested there was no easy answer. “I want 200 or so more cops,” he said. “I don’t know what’s enough.”

Mr. McCarthy said some of the details of the latest shootings suggested they were not random. On Thursday afternoon, he said, three gunman fired at least 40 shots at a car where Rodney S. Kearney, 30, sat with another man, killing Mr. Kearney, who was on his way to pick up his child.

“That was an outright assassination,” Mr. McCarthy said.

The shooting on Friday morning, in which a gunman jumped out of a sport utility vehicle, was also “very clearly targeted,” he said.

Mr. McCarthy said the shooting of Allen Best, along with four other young men, on Thursday was still under investigation. He said the police had found two firearms in a tire store into which the victims had fled.

But Ms. Best said her son and his friends, some of whom had known each other since childhood, had simply been on their way to the store.

    With a Spike in Crime and Police Layoffs, Anxiety Deepens in Newark, NT, 24.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/nyregion/25newark.html

7 People Shot, 3 Fatally, on Violent Day in Newark

December 23, 2010
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and KAREEM FAHIM

Seven people were shot, three of them fatally, in an explosion of violence in Newark on Thursday evening. The bloodshed was part of a spate of shootings and violent carjackings — including the carjacking of a state official — in the city over the last month.

The latest eruption began about 4:30 p.m. in the city’s South Ward. A gunman approached a group of five young men who had congregated by a bail bonds office near the corner of Avon Avenue and South 12th Street and opened fire, then fled, the authorities said. Two of them, both 16, were taken to University Hospital and pronounced dead. The others were treated there for injuries that did not appear to be life-threatening.

The dead were identified as Allen Best and Jarid Smith, both of whom lived in Newark, said Thomas F. Fennelly, chief assistant prosecutor in the Essex County prosecutor’s office and the director of the homicide unit. Investigators said it was unclear what prompted the gunman to open fire.

Ninety minutes later, as the police were still combing the scene, a second, apparently unrelated shooting occurred a few blocks away, at Court and Broome Streets in the city’s Central Ward neighborhood, Mr. Fennelly said. In that case, a gunman walked up to two men sitting in a car and started shooting, killing one of them, Rodney Shacor, 30, of Newark, officials said. The other man was taken to University Hospital with what appeared to be non-life-threatening injuries, the authorities said.

Late last month, the city laid off 163 police officers, about 13 percent of the force. Many residents feared the result might be a return to the rampant crime and bloodshed that dogged Newark for years.

Already this year, the city was experiencing a rise in crime, including murder rates in some neighborhoods that are double what they were last year. But since the layoffs, the city has seen several more waves of violence, including a three-day stretch last week with at least six carjackings and six shootings. One of the latest carjacking victims, a lieutenant for the state attorney general’s office, had his car taken from him at gunpoint on South Orange Avenue on Wednesday night.

    7 People Shot, 3 Fatally, on Violent Day in Newark, NYT, 23.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/nyregion/24newark.html

Town Mute for 30 Years About a Bully’s Killing

December 15, 2010
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER

SKIDMORE, Mo. — The murder of Ken Rex McElroy took place in plain view of dozens of residents of this small farm town, under the glare of the morning sun. But in a dramatic act of solidarity with the gunman, every witness, save the dead man’s wife, denied seeing who had pulled the trigger.

The killing was a shocking end for a notoriously brutal man who had terrorized the area for years with seeming impunity from the law until he was struck down in a moment of vigilante justice. It was also the first major case for a young county prosecutor, not far removed from law school and just months into the job, who said he was confident that the case would be solved soon.

But the silence of the townspeople held. Now, nearly 30 years later, that prosecutor, David A. Baird, is preparing to leave office with his first and most famous case still unsolved.

No one has ever been brought to trial in Mr. McElroy’s death, and, although there is no statute of limitations on murder, most people around here suspect that no one ever will be.

“Once the shroud of silence fell, there was going to be no one talking,” said Cheryl Huston, whose elderly father had been shot by Mr. McElroy and who watched the killing of Mr. McElroy from her family’s grocery store but, like the others, said she did not see the gunman. “They could have pushed and dug, pushed and dug and gotten nothing.”

“We were so bitter and so angry at the law letting us down that it came to somebody taking matters in their own hands,” she said. “No one has any idea what a nightmare we lived.”

As his long tenure comes to an end questions about the lack of resolution in the murder case — perhaps the most infamous in the area since Jesse James was shot nearby a century earlier — continue to follow Mr. Baird. He was charged with wading through the sensational details and moral ambiguities of the case to ensure that, in his words, justice was served.

But justice is a loaded term in a case that challenges the usual assumptions of victim and perpetrator. And Mr. Baird, all these years later, is still unwilling to give his own view on whether justice was served even though — or because — the killer was never tried.

“You could talk to everybody in this case, and they’d give you a different answer,” he said in an interview at his office in the red brick county courthouse in nearby Maryville. “I’m never going to answer that question. It’s never going to happen.”

Richard McFadin, 87, a lawyer, now retired, who represented Mr. McElroy in numerous cases and, after the killing, his widow, said he believed there was enough evidence for a prosecution. He believes one of the gunmen was the suspect named by the widow. “The town got away with murder,” Mr. McFadin said.

The police chief who oversaw the investigation, Hal Riddle, disagrees. He said that Mr. Baird pushed aggressively to bring a case to trial, but that investigators were never able to secure enough evidence to charge someone with a crime.

“If we could have proved who done it, he would have prosecuted him,” said Mr. Riddle, 72 and also retired, who describes the case as the most frustrating of his career.

The last three decades have been tough on this agricultural community of 342, about an hour and a half north of Kansas City. Like so many other small towns, Skidmore has shrunk inside itself, watching businesses close and residents depart.

Perversely, the town’s share of tragedy has grown. Road signs bear a picture of a young man who disappeared nine years ago and is feared dead. A memorial in the tiny downtown park displays the name of an expectant mother murdered six years ago, her fetus cut from her womb.

Even with these raw wounds, the memory of the nightmare surrounding Mr. McElroy — during his years of troublemaking and after a killing that many here feel was forced by an impotent criminal-justice system — continues to loom large.

“After all these years, people talk about it still,” said Marla Messner, 37, a restaurant manager who remembers being hurried inside her home for safety anytime Mr. McElroy came to town. “I think it’s something that’s going to define this town forever.”

Just months after Mr. Baird became county prosecutor — a post he was encouraged to take because “nothing exciting ever happens in Nodaway County”— he found himself in a courtroom for the first time with Mr. McElroy, who had shot an elderly Skidmore grocer in the neck with a shotgun. Known for stealing livestock, harassing women, destroying property and threatening lives, Mr. McElroy had been charged with numerous felonies over the years — his lawyer estimated at least three a year — but had never been convicted.

The streak ended when a jury convicted Mr. McElroy of second-degree assault in the grocer’s shooting. A conviction should have been a victory for the people of Skidmore, but the jury set a maximum sentence of two years, and the judge, without protest from Mr. Baird, released Mr. McElroy on bond pending appeal. Mr. McElroy was quickly rearrested after he appeared in town with a rifle, but he was again released.

When a court hearing was postponed, there was a meeting in town, with the mayor and the sheriff attending, to discuss Mr. McElroy.

Within hours, Mr. Baird heard that there had been a shooting downtown. He was sure it was Mr. McElroy who had done the shooting. It was hours before he learned that it was Mr. McElroy who had been shot, sitting in the front seat of his pickup truck alongside his wife, after picking up some beer at the town bar. Bullet casings from two guns were found. As many as 60 people were reported to have been at the scene, but not one of them would say who had wielded the weapons.

The local major-cases squad investigated, then the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Three grand juries heard evidence. But even after a federal prosecutor forwarded to Mr. Baird what he called “substantial” new evidence, no one was indicted. Instead of playing out in court, the details emerged in newspaper and magazine accounts, as well as a best-selling book, “In Broad Daylight: A Murder in Skidmore, Missouri,” which was later made into a television movie.

Reached by phone, Mr. McElroy’s wife, who has since remarried and left the state, said she was not interested in talking about the case.

Mr. McElroy has been dead for almost three decades now, a round number that has residents here bracing for the next round of visits by reporters. The bar that provided the backdrop for the shooting is closed and for sale for $20,000. The man identified by the widow as the main gunman recently died, something Mr. Baird raised in suggesting that the case may never be reopened.

And Mr. Baird lost his first election, in the Democratic primary this year, by just 25 votes, a loss noted by The Kansas City Star because of his connection with the case. He said he was not at all disappointed to leave office with the case still unsolved. “My experience is that trying a case is not always good at bringing closure,” Mr. Baird said.

As he packed up his office last week, he gave his successor a memo that listed a dozen or so unsolved cases in Nodaway County including, down toward the end, the killing of Mr. McElroy. “Just to be aware,” he explained.

His successor, Robert Rice, already knew how Mr. McElroy died. He grew up hearing the story. And he has already asked the sheriff’s office to re-examine some of the unsolved cases. But not that one.

“I don’t know if I will,” Mr. Rice said.

    Town Mute for 30 Years About a Bully’s Killing, NYT, 15.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/us/16bully.html

Publicist’s Death Could Be Random

December 8, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — The gun used to kill the Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen appears to match the gun a man used to kill himself when police officers approached him for questioning at an apartment building last week, according to preliminary ballistics tests, police officials said on Wednesday.

The police said they believed the murder was a “robbery gone bad” and a “random act of violence,” by a man who had been convicted of other crimes. Neighbors of the man, Harold Martin Smith, 43, said that he had bragged about earning $10,000 for killing Ms. Chasen, 64, for somebody else, but the Beverly Hills police chief, David L. Snowden, said that Mr. Smith apparently acted alone.

“We do not believe he was a paid hit man,” said Detective Sgt. Michael Publicker, who has overseen the investigation. “It leads us to believe that he was trying to rob her.”

It appeared that Mr. Smith had approached Ms. Chasen’s car while riding his bicycle near Sunset Boulevard and Whittier Drive in Beverly Hills, Sergeant Publicker said. Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department obtained a bicycle from the scene of Mr. Smith’s suicide last week. Sergeant Publicker declined to say whether there was any video footage of the bicycle in the several surveillance videos the police have collected.

Sergeant Publicker said that the case was “60 to 70 percent done,” but that more interviews would need to be conducted before they could pronounce the investigation complete. Still, he repeatedly suggested that the case was all but solved. “We want to eliminate every possibility that nobody else was involved.”

“Through the interviews and the information we received, that leads us to believe that he was at a desperate point in his life and was reaching out to do desperate measures,” Sergeant Publicker added. Chief Snowden later declined to elaborate on how his detectives reached such a conclusion.

For weeks now, Ms. Chasen’s murder has captivated this celebrity-obsessed city, particularly because of the mystery surrounding the circumstances. The fact that the most important tip, which prompted the police to go to the apartment building, came through “America’s Most Wanted” has only added to the made-for-Hollywood drama here. Chief Snowden said that the tipster, who has remained anonymous, could receive the $125,000 reward offered by friends of Ms. Chasen.

After receiving the tip from “America’s Most Wanted,” the Beverly Hills detectives approached Mr. Smith last week in the lobby of the apartment building where he lived in shabby section of Hollywood. He then pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head. Mr. Smith, who had been convicted of several crimes, most recently served time three years ago for robbery.

The police said they would not disclose how many shots had been fired, or where the bullet wounds were on Ms. Chasen’s body. Chief Snowden said that no casings were found at the scene of Ms. Chasen’s death. He also declined to release the kind of gun used, but said a more complete analysis would be conducted over the next two weeks.

Ms. Chasen was driving her Mercedes-Benz shortly after midnight on Nov. 16, heading home after attending a premiere party for the film “Burlesque.” Several residents called 911 after hearing gunshots and later found Ms. Chasen dead behind the wheel.

    Publicist’s Death Could Be Random, NYT, 8.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/us/09publicist.html

Judge Will Allow Jurors to See Video of 8-Year-Old Being Killed by Uzi at Gun Show

December 7, 2010
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

BOSTON — A judge ruled Tuesday that jurors can be shown video of an 8-year-old boy accidentally shooting himself in the head with a submachine gun at a gun show, setting up an unusually grisly courtroom scene in the manslaughter trial of a former police chief who organized the event.

Judge Peter A. Velis of Hampden Superior Court in Springfield, Mass., is still deciding whether audio from after the shooting — in which the boy can be heard screaming and his father praying — will be played for the jury. The video will be played in its entirety, but little is visible after the boy, Christopher Bizilj of Manchester, Conn., shot himself.

Judge Velis said he must ensure that the chief, Edward Fleury, receives a fair trial. The video “would shock the conscience of any reasonable human being,” Judge Velis said in court Tuesday, The Associated Press reported.

“The greatest risk in this case is invoking any sympathy,” Judge Velis said.

Douglas L. Keene, a trial consultant in Austin, Tex., said more video — including at times extremely graphic footage — is bound to end up in courtrooms as cities install surveillance cameras and amateurs shoot video with cellphones.

“It obviously doesn’t happen in your average case, but with the advancements in surveillance and technology it’s inevitably going to be more common,” Mr. Keene said. “Fortunately for justice these videos are available, and unfortunately for jurors they’re going to have to weigh the importance of them as evidence.”

Mr. Fleury, 53, was taken out of court by ambulance after the ruling Tuesday when he said he did not feel well, said Kevin Claffey, a first assistant clerk at the courthouse. Jury selection is expected to resume on Wednesday, Mr. Claffey said.

The authorities say that Christopher shot himself in the head while firing a 9-millimeter Micro Uzi at the October 2008 Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo in Westfield, Mass. He was accompanied by his father, an emergency room doctor.

William M. Bennett, the Hampden County district attorney, said the father had chosen the gun for his son to fire because it was smaller — something that actually made it more dangerous and harder to control.

Under Massachusetts law, children under 18 can fire most guns with parental consent, but not machine guns. “There is no exception that would allow a machine gun to be furnished to an 8-year-old, with or without parental consent,” Mr. Bennett said in 2008.

The gun show was co-sponsored by COP Firearms and Training, which was owned by Mr. Fleury, then also the police chief in Pelham, a western Massachusetts town about 30 miles from Westfield. He did not return to the department after being charged in December 2008.

Mr. Fleury is charged with one count of involuntary manslaughter and three counts of furnishing a firearm to a minor. His lawyer did not return a phone call Tuesday. Two Connecticut men and the gun club were also charged in the case.

    Judge Will Allow Jurors to See Video of 8-Year-Old Being Killed by Uzi at Gun Show, NYT, 7.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/us/08uzi.html

A Killing (a First) in a Town Produced by Disney

December 2, 2010
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

CELEBRATION, Fla. — As if the Thanksgiving murder were not enough to ruin things in this subdivision that Disney designed. Now, tanks and SWAT teams?

Here in a community built 14 years ago by the Walt Disney Company as the happiest subdivision on earth — and which, to be fair, has been largely free from urban strife — two major crimes in the span of less than a week have made even the fake snow that blankets the town square every evening hour on the hour seem a little less cheery.

Late into Thursday night, sheriff’s deputies barricaded several blocks in this neo-traditional town of 10,000 people and miles of white rail fencing, trying to talk a despondent and armed 52-year-old man out of his home. After more than 14 hours, sheriff’s deputies entered his home early Friday and found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Earlier, the schoolhouse near the town square was locked down. Buzzing helicopters interrupted horse-and-carriage rides. Even the holiday cocktail party at the golf course was canceled.

The situation, which a sheriff’s deputy described as a domestic dispute involving a father who had lost a job and his marriage, was a tragic ending to a week that saw another violent death in Celebration.Sometime over Thanksgiving weekend, Matteo Patrick Giovanditto, 58, was murdered, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office said. It was the first murder in Celebration history. Concerned neighbors who had not heard from him went into his first-floor condo, one block from the artificial ice rink on the town square. He was on the floor covered with a blanket, according to the police.

Officers later located his black Corvette in a nearby town, but have yet to make an arrest. Residents were assured that there was nothing to fear.

“They’ve got some really substantial leads,” said a sheriff’s spokeswoman, Twis Lizasuain. “We haven’t disclosed what we found, but it was a big break in the case to find the vehicle.”

Mr. Giovanditto, who was from Massachusetts, moved to Florida in the 1980s to teach, his cousin, Theresa Troiano, said from Tewksbury, Mass.

“He was a wonderful young man from a big New England family,” she said. “We hope there is swift justice.”

Mr. Giovanditto moved to Celebration in 2004. He lived with his Chihuahua, Lucy, neighbors said. His house was a popular destination for trick-or-treaters, and he frequently weighed in on the Front Porch, a kind of Facebook for Celebration residents.

“He was a good guy online,” said Alex Morton, the publisher of the monthly Celebration Independent and one of the first people to buy a house when the subdivision opened in 1996.

“This town is all corporate executives and golden parachuters,” said Mr. Morton, who was holding up the printing of his paper until he had more news on the murder and, now, the standoff happening a few blocks from his tiny newspaper office.

The killing of Mr. Giovanditto was a crack in the facade of this community, a 10-minute drive from Disney World, that was just too hard to ignore — especially with the standoff coming right on its heels.

“It’s like Manhattan!” said Vince Cassaro. He ought to know. The former Connecticut resident worked in New York City before moving his family here 12 years ago.

Had residents ever seen a SWAT team in town before?

“Maybe for the Boy Scouts when they do a display, but that’s about it,” said Jeffry Ewing, a resident who had to stop work on a house renovation that was within the police perimeter.

Of course, there have been other indications here that the ride might be over. Smaller crimes are not unheard of. In 1998, a robber who said he had a gun threatened a family and robbed them in their home. It was the town’s first reported violent crime.

The economy has taken some of the shine from the streets, too. On Thanksgiving Day, the movie theater, which proudly showed its share of Disney films, went out of business. And there is no one who has not been hoping that home prices stop dropping. At their peak, homes sold for an average of $1 million. Now, they might go for half that.

Glenn Williams, who was watching the sheriff’s deputies block the roads, said the price of his house had fallen to about $360,000 now from $825,000 two years ago.

Like others, he was sad for the families involved in the standoff and the murder.

“But I’m surprised it’s been this long before something happened,” Mr. Williams said.

For visitors who come to both gawk and admire the famously perfect community, the murder only added to the narrative.

Beth Guskay drove in from Lakeland, Fla., Thursday with her daughter and granddaughter to shop and hit a favorite sushi restaurant.

“I call it the ‘Stepford Wives’ community. As soon as you drive in, it’s creepy,” she said. “I think it’s for people who don’t think anything bad is ever going to happen to them.”

It is not that, so much, residents said. Bad things happen everywhere.

Still, a murder and a standoff in the same week are a little much.

“It’s a crack in the foundation, let’s put it that way,” said Jim Zimmer, who with his wife of 25 years maintains a house both in Celebration and Atlanta.

He made a case for downplaying the murder, even as he watched a sheriff’s deputy with a rifle shoo a woman trying to get to her car back into her home.

“For our own property values,” he said, “we need the illusion.”

Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta.

    A Killing (a First) in a Town Produced by Disney, NYT, 2.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/us/03celebration.html

Handguns for 18-Year-Olds?

November 25, 2010
The New York Times

The National Rifle Association keeps coming up with clever new ways to undermine public safety.

Just in the past year, the gun-rights group sought to scuttle basic gun controls enacted by the District of Columbia, including a ban on powerful semiautomatic weapons in the nation’s capital. The group also blocked common-sense efforts in Congress to bar people on the F.B.I.’s terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives. It kept open the deadly loophole in federal law that lets gun traffickers and other unqualified buyers to obtain weapons without background checks at gun shows.

Last week, President Obama had barely nominated a new director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is supposed to control firearms — Andrew Traver, a well-qualified career professional — before the gun lobby denounced him as “deeply aligned with gun control advocates.” Mr. Traver’s sin? Associating with a police chief’s group that wants to reduce the use of handguns on city streets. The nomination was rated dead on arrival in the next Congress, where the N.R.A. will, if anything, be more powerful.

Finally, the gun lobby has filed two lawsuits in federal court in Lubbock, Tex., to compel the State of Texas to allow young people between the ages of 18 and 20 years old to buy handguns and carry them concealed in public places.

The first suit challenges the longstanding federal law prohibiting licensed gun dealers from selling handguns to anyone under 21 years old. The second case contests a Texas law setting 21 as the minimum age for carrying a concealed weapon.

As a legal matter, both lawsuits should fail. In its recent Second Amendment rulings, the Supreme Court struck down complete bans on handgun ownership, but explicitly left room for limits on gun ownership and possession by felons and the mentally ill, and other reasonable restrictions like Texas’ age limitations. The Supreme Court has said nothing to suggest that the Second Amendment requires Americans to allow armed teenagers in their communities.

Beyond the dubious legal claims, the idea that young individuals ages 18 to 20 have a constitutional right to buy weapons and carry them loaded and concealed in public is breathtakingly irresponsible.

Young people in that age range commit a disproportionate amount of gun violence. F.B.I. crime data from 2009 shows arrests for murder, nonnegligent homicides and other violent crimes peaking from ages 18 to 20. That age group accounts for about 5 percent of the population but nearly 20 percent of homicide and manslaughter arrests, and nearly twice the number of such arrests for those ages 30 to 34, according to the F.B.I. figures.

What the N.R.A. should be doing is keeping our streets and our teenagers safer by working to extend the prohibition on guns sales to people 18 to 20 years old by licensed dealers to include unlicensed sellers at gun shows and elsewhere.

    Handguns for 18-Year-Olds?, NYT, 25.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/opinion/26fri1.html

Two Arrests in Shooting Death of 5-Year-Old

November 5, 2010
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — It was a real-life Halloween nightmare: 5-year-old Aaron Shannon Jr. was posing for pictures in his Spider-Man costume in the backyard of his family’s South Los Angeles home when men opened fire from a nearby alley. Aaron was hit in the back of the head and died in the hospital the next day.

The shooting set off outrage throughout Los Angeles County, with multiple law enforcement agencies working on the case and various government agencies offering a combined $100,000 reward in the case.

On Friday, the Los Angeles police announced that they had arrested two suspects: Leonard Hall Jr., 21, and Marcus Denson, 18, whom they identified as members of the Kitchen Crips gang.

At a news conference, Deputy Police Chief Patrick M. Gannon said the Shannon family had no gang ties and had not been targets. He said he did not think the shooting was part of a gang initiation, as had been rumored in a city plagued by violence between Crips and Bloods.

“We have a lot of murders in which the killers and victims are kind of on the same page,” Chief Gannon said. “This definitely isn’t one of those.”

East of Central Avenue, near where the shooting occurred, is Crips territory; west of it is Bloods territory. Because the shooting occurred in Bloods territory and the gunmen fled east across Central Avenue, police believed that cross-border gang activity was involved, though they would not speculate about a motive.

Chief Gannon said the police received tips from community members that helped identify the suspects, including tips from gang members.

“This incident shook the consciousness not only of every resident in the community; it also shook the consciousness of gang members,” he said.

Aaron’s grandfather, William Shannon, 55, was struck in the wrist in the shootings, and his uncle was hit in the thigh. Neither man’s injuries were serious.

Mr. Shannon said they were preparing to leave for a Halloween party around 1:30 p.m. when two men started shooting into the yard through a chain-link fence.

Aaron Shannon Sr., the boy’s father, carried the child into the bathroom, where they waited until paramedics arrived.

“He was so proud to be Spider-Man,” William Shannon said. “He was running around and jumping. I had just mentioned what a beautiful day it was when the shooting happened.”

    Two Arrests in Shooting Death of 5-Year-Old, NYT, 5.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/us/06halloween.html

Gunman Has Grievance With Marines, F.B.I. Says

October 29, 2010
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — The perpetrator of a string of shootings of buildings near the capital this month is believed to have a “grievance” with the United States Marine Corps, Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said Friday.

Officials have not yet identified who is responsible but say the four sets of shots — fired at the Pentagon, the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va., and the Marine recruiting station in Chantilly, Va. — came from the same gun and probably from the same person.

“He was somebody we thought might be upset or might have an issue with the Marine Corps,” said Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the F.B.I. Mr. Ames said the gunman was believed to have recently experienced “a significant personal crisis,” like a divorce, the loss of a job or the death of a loved one.

Mr. Ames declined to comment on whether the F.B.I. believed that the gunman was a Marine.

The shootings have formed an unsettling pattern in the days before two large events in the capital — a rally organized by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Saturday, and the Marine Corps Marathon, with 30,000 runners, on Sunday.

Officials said they believed that the gunman had no intention of harming people. All the shootings were aimed at buildings, and most took place when the buildings were empty. Mr. Ames said that the authorities asked the gunman to turn himself in.

The fourth shooting took place early Friday, the authorities said, again at the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

A spokeswoman for the Police Department in Prince William County, where the museum is located, said several shots fired overnight caused damage to glass that forms the upper part of the building. The episode was discovered around 7 a.m. when employees arrived for work.

    Gunman Has Grievance With Marines, F.B.I. Says, NYT, 29.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/us/30shootings.html

Teenager Known for Hiccups Now Faces a Murder Charge

October 25, 2010
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

MIAMI — Floridians frequently become famous either for heinous crimes or odd achievements, like building the world’s largest rubber-band ball. Rarely, however, do the two intersect, which is why the Sunshine State marveled on Monday at the fate of Jennifer Mee.

Ms. Mee, one may recall, was the “hiccup girl” of 2007 — the teenager from Tampa whose nonstop hiccups, up to 50 times a minute for six weeks, caught the attention of the nation. Now she is back in the spotlight, facing murder charges.

The police in St. Petersburg say Ms. Mee, 19, lured Shannon Griffin, 22, to a home there on Saturday, where two male accomplices — Laron C. Raiford, 20, and Lamont Newton, 22 — tried to rob him. When Mr. Griffin resisted, he was shot four times and killed, the police said.

Ms. Mee, Mr. Raiford and Mr. Newton are all charged with first-degree murder. A judge on Monday ordered them held without bail.

The police said in a statement that the three had admitted their involvement, but the authorities did not divulge who was accused of pulling the trigger.

Rachel Robidoux, Ms. Mee’s mother, cried in a radio interview on the “MJ Morning Show” on WFLZ in Tampa. “I don’t think she knew what was going to happen, because that’s not Jennifer,” Ms. Robidoux said. “She’s not out to hurt anyone.”

Ms. Robidoux said that she did not know where her daughter might have gone wrong, but that the hiccup fame — “her case wasn’t a case of the hiccups, it was a curse of the hiccups,” she said — might have led to the wrong crowd of friends.

“All of a sudden people knew her name and she would talk to them on different chat sites, and they would act like they knew her when they didn’t,” Ms. Robidoux said. “She’s very naïve, and I just think she was getting herself into stuff when she didn’t know what she was doing.”

    Teenager Known for Hiccups Now Faces a Murder Charge, NYT, 25.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/us/26hiccup.html

Shots Fired at Pentagon

October 19, 2010
Filed at 11:36 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


WASHINGTON (AP) — Someone fired shots at the Pentagon early Tuesday, hitting the building and causing minor damage, defense officials said.

Police who protect the massive Defense Department headquarters temporarily locked down some road and pedestrian entrances to the building after a civilian reported he may have heard shots at about 5 a.m. on the south side of the facility.

A sweep of the area and facility found that some shots had hit the building, Marine Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman said. He didn't know how many or from what kind of weapon.

Roads and pedestrian entrances leading to the Pentagon were reopened a little after 5:30 a.m. but part of nearby highway 395 was later temporarily closed for part of the investigation.

A dozen police also were seen at around 9 a.m. walking side-by-side in a line as they combed through a grassy area on the south side of the building.

Lapan said there were no injuries. In response to a question, he said he did not know whether there was any connection between Tuesday's incident and Monday's discovery of bullet holes in windows at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va., some 30 miles south of the Pentagon.

A cleaning crew at the museum associated with the Quantico Marine Base called police when they noticed the bullet holes in windows high up in a part of the building that faces Interstate 95.

Police believe the shots were fired at the museum late Saturday or early Sunday, when no one was inside. Investigators used a crane to inspect the damage Monday. Because of the height of the holes, police suspect the bullets were likely fired from a rifle, but they are still working to determine what caliber of bullet was used.

Several glass panels were hit, causing about $20,000 in damage. None of the museum's artifacts - including a harrier jet hanging near the damaged windows - were hit.

Lapan said this was the first incident of its kind since early March, when a gunman opened fire at a security checkpoint into the Pentagon in a point-blank attack that wounded two police officers.

The shooter, identified as John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., was shot by police and died hours after being admitted to a hospital in critical condition. Authorities had no motive for the shooting, but there had been signs that Bedell may have harbored resentment for hte military and had doubts about the facts behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

    Shots Fired at Pentagon, NYT, 19.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/10/19/us/politics/AP-US-Pentagon-Incident.html

2 Officers Shoot and Kill a Man Carrying a Knife

October 3, 2010
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

A knife-wielding man in Upper Manhattan was fatally shot by the police early Sunday after ignoring repeated demands to drop the weapon and enduring a strike from a Taser gun, the police said.

After the man, Emmanuel Paulino, 24, tore the Taser’s electric probes from his body, two officers fired nine shots at him, the police said. Mr. Paulino was pronounced dead at NewYork-Presbyterian/Allen hospital.

On Sunday night, the police released a recording and a transcript of a 911 call that they said was made by Mr. Paulino himself in which he threatened to kill police officers.

The shooting was the second in two days involving the police. On Saturday, officers in the Bronx shot and wounded a city correction officer, Victor Hernandez, 35, who, the police said, had refused to drop a loaded pistol that he had pointed at plainclothes officers.

The police said the confrontation started with the 911 call from Mr. Paulino’s cellphone at 5:15 a.m.

Mr. Paulino, responding to a 911 operator who asked where his emergency was, said, “I want you to call the cops cause I’m ready to kill,” according to a Police Department transcript of the call.

The operator said, “What?”

Mr. Paulino replied, “I’m ready to kill some cops right now.”

He gave his address as 121 Vermilyea Avenue and said, “I’ll be right here,” according to the transcript.

Uniformed patrol officers responding to the call saw Mr. Paulino with a black knife in his hand. When he refused to drop it, a sergeant, whose name was not released, fired the Taser. Mr. Paulino kept advancing on the four officers who surrounded him and pointed at his own head, a law enforcement official said.

Two officers fired a total of nine shots at Mr. Paulino, striking him several times in the chest, the police said.

A spokesman for Mr. Paulino’s family, Fernando Mateo, said on Sunday night: “The family is very distraught. The mother saw her son being shot from her fourth-floor window. We know he does not have a pristine past. But we believe the police could have handled it differently.”

Referring to the 911 call, Mr. Mateo said that “a threat does not mean an act of violence,” and added that Mr. Paulino had been depressed.

The police said that nine civilian witnesses saw Mr. Paulino continue to advance on the officers after repeated warnings, and then again after he was jolted with the Taser.

The Police Department did not identify the two officers or the sergeant but said that one of the officers was 26, the other 27. Both joined the force in 2006. Neither had been involved in a previous shooting, and both passed department mandated alcohol tests, a law enforcement official said.

The officers were treated for trauma at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital.

Mr. Paulino was on federal probation for a drug conviction, according to a law enforcement official and records on the Web site of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Ydanis Rodriguez, a City Council member, held a press conference Sunday afternoon with Mr. Paulino’s mother, Liliana. In a statement, Mr. Rodriguez asked for a full investigation of the incident. “As a community, we want to be sure that all our questions get answered, and that Manuel’s mother understands why her son died,” he said.

Mr. Rodriguez said he spoke to the district attorney’s office and asked for an independent investigation.

Eliana Rodriguez, a resident of Mr. Paulino’s building, said he was a quiet man. “Always, I saw him sitting on the stairs and smoking with a friend,” she said. Her father, Manuel, had known Mr. Paulino for about 10 years, she said. “He always said hi to my father,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “For me, he was a good person.”

    2 Officers Shoot and Kill a Man Carrying a Knife, NYT, 3.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/nyregion/04shoot.html

More States Allowing Guns in Bars and Restaurants

October 3, 2010
The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY

NASHVILLE — Happy-hour beers were going for $5 at Past Perfect, a cavernous bar just off this city’s strip of honky-tonks and tourist shops when Adam Ringenberg walked in with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol in the front pocket of his gray slacks.

Mr. Ringenberg, a technology consultant, is one of the state’s nearly 300,000 handgun permit holders who have recently seen their rights greatly expanded by a new law — one of the nation’s first — that allows them to carry loaded firearms into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.

“If someone’s sticking a gun in my face, I’m not relying on their charity to keep me alive,” said Mr. Ringenberg, 30, who said he carries the gun for personal protection when he is not at work.

Gun rights advocates like Mr. Ringenberg may applaud the new law, but many customers, waiters and restaurateurs here are dismayed by the decision.

“That’s not cool in my book,” Art Andersen, 44, said as he nursed a Coors Light at Sam’s Sports Bar and Grill near Vanderbilt University. “It opens the door to trouble. It’s giving you the right to be Wyatt Earp.”

Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. (Eighteen other states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.) The new measures in Tennessee and the three other states come after two landmark Supreme Court rulings that citizens have an individual right — not just in connection with a well-regulated militia — to keep a loaded handgun for home defense.

Experts say these laws represent the latest wave in the country’s gun debate, as the gun lobby seeks, state by state, to expand the realm of guns in everyday life.

The rulings, which overturned handgun bans in Washington and Chicago, have strengthened the stance of gun rights advocates nationwide. More than 250 lawsuits now challenge various gun laws, and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a Republican, called for guns to be made legal on campuses after a shooting last week at the University of Texas, Austin, arguing that armed bystanders might have stopped the gunman.

The new laws have also brought to light the status of 20 other states — New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts among them — that do not address the question, appearing by default to allow those with permits to carry guns into establishments that serve alcohol, according to the Legal Community Against Violence, a nonprofit group that promotes gun control and tracks state gun laws.

“A lot of states for a long time have not felt the need to say you could or couldn’t do it,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “There weren’t as many conceal-carry permits out there, so it wasn’t really an issue.” Now, he said, “the attitude from the gun lobby is that they should be able to take their guns wherever they want. In the last year, they’re starting to move toward needing no permit at all.”

State Representative Curry Todd, a Republican who first introduced the guns-in-bars bill here, said that carrying a gun inside a tavern was never the law’s primary intention. Rather, he said, the law lets people defend themselves while walking to and from restaurants.

“Folks were being robbed, assaulted — it was becoming an issue of personal safety,” said Mr. Todd, who added that the National Rifle Association had aided his legislative efforts. “The police aren’t going to be able to protect you. They’re going to be checking out the crime scene after you and your family’s been shot or injured or assaulted or raped.”

Under Tennessee’s new law, gun permit holders are not supposed to drink alcohol while carrying their weapons. Mr. Ringenberg washed down his steak sandwich with a Coke.

But critics of the law say the provision is no guarantee of safety, pointing to a recent shooting in Virginia where a customer who had a permit to carry a concealed weapon shot himself in the leg while drinking beer at a restaurant.

“Guns and alcohol don’t mix; that’s the bottom line,” said Michael Drescher, a spokesman for Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, who vetoed the bill but was overridden by the legislature.

The law allows restaurant and bar owners to prohibit people from carrying weapons inside their establishments by posting signs out front. But many restaurateurs are reluctant to discourage the patronage of gun owners, often saying privately that they do not allow guns but holding off on posting a sign.

“I’ve talked to a lot of restaurants, and probably 50 to 60 percent of them have no clue what’s going on,” said Ray Friedman, 51, who has created a Web site listing the firearms policies of area restaurants.

Previously, states like Tennessee did not allow its residents to carry concealed weapons unless they had a special permit from the local authorities. That began to shift in the mid-1990s, as the gun lobby pushed states to adopt policies that made permits for concealed weapons more accessible.

The new law passed with broad legislative support, despite opposition from the Nashville Chamber of Commerce and the Tennessee Hospitality Association.

So far, the law has been challenged only once. Filed by an anonymous waiter, the complaint contended that allowing guns into a tavern creates an unsafe work environment for servers. His complaint was denied by the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health.

“A loaded concealed weapon in a bar is a recognized hazard,” said David Randolph Smith, a lawyer who represents the waiter and is preparing to appeal the decision. “I have a right to go into a restaurant or bar and not have people armed. And of course, the waiter has a right to a safe workplace.”

Down at Bobby’s Idle Hour, however, Mike Gideon said he did not believe that guns in bars were unsafe. As he sipped a beer in the fading afternoon light, Mr. Gideon, who characterized his 19-gun collection as “serious,” said that having a few permit holders around made any public space safer and that he boycotts any business that does not allow him to carry a weapon.

“People who have gun permits have the cleanest records around,” said Mr. Gideon, 54. “The guy that’s going to do the bad thing? He’s not worried about the law at all. The ‘No Guns’ sign just says to him, ‘Hey, buddy, smooth sailing.’ ”

    More States Allowing Guns in Bars and Restaurants, NYT, 3.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/us/04guns.html

Man, 25, Is Arrested in Killing at Party Near Seton Hall

September 27, 2010
The New York Times
By CATE DOTY and NATE SCHWEBER

The authorities arrested and charged a suspect on Monday night in the weekend shooting near Seton Hall University that left one student dead and four other people injured.

The suspect, Nicholas Welch, 25, was detained Monday evening at his home in East Orange, N.J., a few doors from the house where the shooting occurred early Saturday morning.

The police are still looking for another suspect, Marcus Bascus, 19, who they said gave Mr. Welch the gun he used in the shooting.

Both Mr. Welch and Mr. Bascus have at least one previous arrest on drug charges, the police said. They face charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

The police said Mr. Welch had no ties to any of the victims.

The gunman had been at large since the shooting, which took place in a neighborhood so dangerous that guests are often checked for weapons before entering parties.

According to witnesses, the man tried to enter a party that was being held at a two-story house on South Clinton Street about a mile from Seton Hall’s campus. The street borders the Vailsburg neighborhood of Newark, which is troubled by gangs and has been the scene of one other recent shooting.

Witnesses said bouncers turned away the man, who they believed would disrupt the party. But he returned later, around 12:20 a.m, entered the party and opened fire. Jessica Townsend, a friend of one of the victims, said she saw the man enter with his arm outstretched, holding a gun. He shot five partygoers, at least one in the head. The gunman then fled.

The police said Mr. Welch could not go far from the scene of the shooting because the area was locked down by the police, so he simply went back to his house, at 531 South Clinton Street.

Jessica A. Moore, 19, a sophomore honors student from Virginia who had tried to help another victim, was shot and died later that day. The two other female victims, both undergraduates at Seton Hall, were shot in the neck and face. The two male victims were not connected to the university. All were taken to University Hospital in Newark.

    Man, 25, Is Arrested in Killing at Party Near Seton Hall, NYT, 27.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/nyregion/28seton.html

Lax State Gun Laws Tied to Crimes in Other States

September 26, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Nearly 600 mayors nationwide, led by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and other city leaders, are mounting a new campaign to identify states with lax gun laws and push for tighter restrictions to prevent the trafficking of guns used in crimes.

A study due to be released this week by a coalition called Mayors Against Illegal Guns uses previously unavailable federal gun data to identify what it says are the states that most often export guns used in crimes across state lines. It concludes that the 10 worst offenders per capita, led by Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky, supplied nearly half the 43,000 guns traced to crime scenes in other states last year.

The study also seeks to draw a link between gun trafficking and gun control laws by analyzing gun restrictions in all 50 states in areas like background checks for gun purchases, policies on concealed weapons permits and state inspections of gun dealers. It finds that, across the board, those states with less restrictive gun laws exported guns used in crimes at significantly higher rates than states with more stringent laws. An advance copy of the study was provided to The New York Times.

“There are 12,000 gun murders a year in our country, and this report makes it perfectly clear how common-sense trafficking laws can prevent many of them,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who is the co-chairman of the coalition with Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston. “For mayors around the country, this isn’t about gun control. It’s about crime control.”

The gun trafficking issue provides Mr. Bloomberg, often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, with another national platform. He has been the face of the mayors’ coalition since it was created in 2006 in opposition to a Congressional amendment that restricted the sharing of federal gun data with the local police.

Since its inception, the group, which now includes 596 mayors nationwide, has expanded into other gun-related issues, including the exporting of guns from the United States to Mexican drug cartels.

The mayors plan to use the new trafficking data to push for more stringent gun restrictions at the state and federal levels. Among the targets, coalition officials said, will be closing the so-called gun show loophole. The loophole allows people to buy firearms at gun shows without going through the usual background checks that weed out felons and other banned buyers.

Gun control advocates have fought a losing battle against the loophole for more than a decade, but neither Congress nor the Obama administration has shown any inclination to revisit the issue, particularly since the Supreme Court and lower courts have issued a series of rulings affirming Second Amendment rights.

The mayors’ push to identify and crack down on states with high rates of gun trafficking is sure to face stiff opposition from gun rights advocates, who have been buoyed by the court rulings.

Chris W. Cox, the National Rifle Association’s chief lobbyist in Washington, dismissed the upcoming report as “a cute little P.R. stunt.” When told of the main findings, Mr. Cox said the report appeared to have relied on “flawed assumptions” about how guns flow across state lines and are traced back to their original purchasers.

“It’s completely bogus for a group with a clear political agenda to release some study based on selective statistics,” he said. “This is not a serious discussion. But this is what we’ve come to expect from Mayor Bloomberg and his gun control agenda.”

Authors of the study, however, said they had conducted a careful analysis of reams of gun “trace” data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — showing the path of guns confiscated at crime scenes — in reaching their conclusions. They said the study provided the deepest look to date at how states export guns used in crimes and how that relates to gun restrictions in those states.

James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University who was not involved in preparing the study, said the findings were likely to attract wide interest from academics and policymakers. Of particular significance, he said, will be the study’s data linking the laxity of gun laws in some states to the exporting of guns used in crimes in other states.

“What this does is help refute some of the statements that people make on the pro-gun side in saying that tougher gun laws are unconnected to reducing crime,” he said.

“A state’s gun laws are only as good as the weakest link in the national chain,” Professor Fox said. “A state with weaker gun laws becomes a supplier for states with stronger laws.”

Indeed, the authors of the mayors’ study, which was prepared largely out of Mr. Bloomberg’s office, said the findings suggested that gun traffickers had sought out states with less restrictive gun-purchase laws.

“What this really shows is that bad laws really do equal more gun trafficking,” said John Feinblatt, Mr. Bloomberg’s chief policy adviser, “and that gaps in the law really do make a difference.”

The study found that Mississippi, the state with the highest rate of crime-gun exports, supplied 50 out-of-state guns per 100,000 residents — more than three times the national average.

It also found that Mississippi, like all of the other states with the highest export rates, had relatively lax laws for bringing gun prosecutions, conducting background checks on buyers and preventing illegal purchases and transfers of guns. Officials at the Mississippi attorney general’s office declined to comment on the findings.

But Mr. Cox, of the N.R.A., said that the best way to prevent illegal trafficking was for the police and prosecutors to crack down on criminals, not to enact further restrictions that, he said, serve only to make it tougher for law-abiding citizens to purchase weapons. He predicted the new data from the mayors’ coalition would have no real impact on public policy.

“Do I think Mayor Bloomberg and his group are desperate for relevancy in a debate where they have no legitimate role? Sure,” Mr. Cox said. “Do I think their approach will continue to be rejected by the American people and Congress? I do.”

    Lax State Gun Laws Tied to Crimes in Other States, NYT, 26.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/politics/27guns.html

Seton Hall Student Is Fatally Shot at a Party

September 25, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and NATE SCHWEBER

A Seton Hall University honors student was fatally wounded and four other people, including two fellow students, were injured early Saturday when a gunman walked into a house party about a mile from the campus and opened fire, the authorities said.

The violence began around 12:20 a.m. on the first floor of 564 South Clinton Street, a two-story house in East Orange, N.J., where about 50 young people had gathered, said Sgt. Andrew M. Di Elmo, a spokesman for the East Orange Police Department.

When the gunfire ceased, three 19-year-old women, all Seton Hall students, had been hit. One of them, identified as Jessica A. Moore, a sophomore, was shot in the head and died Saturday afternoon, Sergeant Di Elmo said. One of the other women was hit in the arm and grazed in the face, and the third woman was struck in the foot, he said.

A fourth victim, a 25-year-old man who the police said attended the New Jersey Institute of Technology, was hit in the left thigh. In addition, a New York man, 20, was struck in the back, the police said. All of the victims were taken to University Hospital in Newark.

Sergeant Di Elmo said events earlier in the night might have prompted the assault. He said the gunman had tried to “crash the party” but was denied entry and “physically removed.”

The man returned a short time later. “He came in with a gun,” the sergeant said. “He made his way through and started opening fire.”

Sergeant Di Elmo said the gunman “fled on foot,” and by Saturday night, no one had been arrested.

Jessica Townsend, 19, who was at the party, said that Ms. Moore was her roommate and that she had died while trying to help another of the victims, who she said was named Nakeisha.

“Everyone was running out; everyone was watching out for themselves,” Ms. Townsend said. “She said, ‘I’m going to protect Nakeisha.’ ”

Ms. Townsend said she was one of the last to leave the room, and on her way out saw a woman lying facedown. Turning her over, she said, she was shocked to learn that it was Ms. Moore.

The university’s vice president of student affairs, Laura A. Wankel, said Ms. Moore was studying psychology and lived in a campus dormitory. Ms. Moore wrote in a blog post that she hoped to eventually work for the Department of Veterans Affairs “so I can talk to soldiers about war.”

A friend of Ms. Moore’s, Delores Sarfo-Darko, 19, said that Ms. Moore’s father was in the military and that she had family in Virginia and Tennessee. Ms. Sarfo-Darko said her friend had dreamed of being a singer.

A prayer service for Ms. Moore was held on the campus on Saturday, and the university made counselors available to students.

Some neighbors said the house where the shooting occurred was notorious for loud parties.

A neighbor, who would identify himself only by his first name, Kay, said he was sitting on his front stoop about a block away when the shots rang out.

“I heard two shots, then a pause, then four more shots,” he said. “Then I heard a bunch of people screaming.”


Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting.

    Seton Hall Student Is Fatally Shot at a Party, NYT, 25.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/nyregion/26seton.html

Deliveryman Is Shot Dead, Apparently From a Roof

September 4, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and MICK MEENAN

A 39-year-old man driving on his bread delivery route through Brooklyn on Friday night was killed after bullets apparently fired by someone on a building’s rooftop pierced the ceiling of his work van and struck him in the head, the police said.

Whoever fired the shots then disappeared, as the driver, identified by the police as Jorge Martinez, slumped over at the wheel of his van, which continued to career west along Avenue X until it crashed into a light pole at West 11th Street and came to rest.

Paramedics with the Emergency Medical Service responded to 911 calls from the Gravesend neighborhood shortly after 10:30 p.m. and took Mr. Martinez to Coney Island Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, the police said.

“It looks like the shots came down from the top,” said a law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing. “It was shots that came through the roof of the van.”

The official added: “We’re looking for a gunman who fired from a rooftop.”

Crime scene investigators found eight shell casings on the roof of 2369 West 11th Street after the shooting, the police said. Two bullets had ripped through the van’s ceiling, and one of them hit the driver, the police said.

The police did not identify the caliber of the bullets or pinpoint where the six bullets that did not hit the van had landed.

It was not immediately clear if Mr. Martinez was the intended target or if the bullets were stray shots meant for someone, or something, else.

The shooting occurred in a neighborhood of tightly packed homes, near Public School 721.

Mr. Martinez lived in a basement apartment on 46th Avenue in Elmhurst, Queens.

In the driveway of the home on Saturday, Mr. Martinez’s teenage son and daughter said he was a devout Catholic who came from Ecuador about seven years ago and always told them to do well in school.

“He used to pray every night before he went to work that everything would be O.K., because he said there were crazy drivers at night and he was afraid he might get hit,” said Jennifer Martinez, 16. “But not this, getting shot.”

She and her brother, Jorge Jr., 14, who live with their mother in New Jersey, had just spent a month of summer vacation with their father. They said they were expecting to go shopping for school clothes with him after his overnight shift. Instead, their father’s landlord, Robelo Mendoza, 51, awakened them on Saturday morning with the news.

    Deliveryman Is Shot Dead, Apparently From a Roof, NYT, 4.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/nyregion/05slay.html

A Fatal Encounter in a Newark Park

August 20, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON and SERGE F. KOVALESKI

FRIDAY afternoon was sliding at last toward evening, with what promised to be a weekend of memories and laughter ahead. Defarra Gaymon, 48, the charming and dapper chief executive of a credit union 900 miles south in Atlanta, had been back in his boyhood home in New Jersey for only a matter of hours, and already he was supposed to be in two different places at once.

He had told a former pastor that he planned on attending Family Vacation Bible School at St. Paul Baptist Church in Montclair, the church where he married his high school girlfriend, Mellanie Peoples, more than 20 years and four children ago. The class was to begin at 6 p.m. that day, July 16. At that exact time, he was due at Egan & Sons, an upscale Irish pub a mile away, to join a reunion of alumni from Montclair High School, where he graduated in 1980.

But on that Friday, Mr. Gaymon went to neither the church nor the pub, choosing instead a third destination that would shock his friends and co-workers — people who believed they really knew the man — in the days and weeks ahead.

He went to Branch Brook Park, a 115-year-old grassy belt of ponds and fountains surrounded by gritty Newark. In polite circles and press releases, the park is best known for its cherry blossoms; in other circles and news stories it is also well known as a destination for gay men seeking anonymous trysts in the overgrown thickets and patches of forest.

Edward Esposito, 29, was also in the park that day. An eight-year veteran of the Essex County Sheriff’s Office, Officer Esposito was working undercover to arrest men soliciting sex.

What followed remains under investigation, a chain of events in which both men would be described as behaving entirely contrary to character, with the gentle banker whose sister called him a “softie” turning violent, and the level-headed officer, facing an unarmed man in a wide-open space, responding with lethal force. In the end, in a placid, grassy spot beside a pond, Officer Esposito shot Mr. Gaymon in the abdomen, killing him.

Officer Esposito, who was raised in a family thick with police officers, has cooperated with investigators from the prosecutor’s office and returned to work. Mr. Gaymon, the son of a Baptist minister, was buried last month in Columbia, S.C., where he lived for more than a decade.

More than 300 people attended the funeral, including an emissary sent by the mayor of Atlanta. Mourners were invited to take piggy banks from his credit union that bore his picture. They were handed 10-page programs filled with pictures and poems and anguished goodbyes, including this, signed simply, “Mom and Dad”:

“I can’t quit thinking of you. I think I’m going insane.”

 

BEFORE he was even married, George Gaymon decided that if God answered his prayer to make his first child a boy, he would name him Defarra. But outside his family, George Gaymon’s son rarely used the unusual name; he was known as Dean.

He was born in Topeka, Kan., where his father was stationed in the Air Force, then moved to Anchorage, Alaska, and Montclair.

“Defarra was an interesting child,” George Gaymon said in an interview in July. “He was happy-go-lucky; he liked to make others laugh.” He had “the mind of a scientist,” and also loved to play with pets and with his friends, his father said. Defarra, he said, grew into a popular teen who still wanted to dance when everyone else was packing it in for the night.

At Montclair High, a long list of activities landed beside his name in the yearbook: French Club, Spanish Club, Latin-Italian Club, Chess Club. He used to tell his father that he wanted to visit every country on earth while he was young, so that he could sit back and remember it all when he was old. He graduated from Benedict College in Columbia and returned to Montclair to begin a career in banking. He started as a teller at Fleet Bank. He wore three-piece suits and carried a briefcase while his colleagues wore Polo shirts and khakis.

“Dean dressed the part as if he were the president,” George Gaymon recalled.

The younger Mr. Gaymon moved his family to Columbia in the late 1990s.

“In the early ’90s, banks suffered from a recession, similar to today’s situation, which afforded me a new opportunity,” he later wrote in promotional material for the Credit Union Executives Society. “I came across what was called a credit union — not knowing exactly what a credit union was.”

He prided himself on being something of a miracle worker for people who could not get loans elsewhere. Many such clients showed up for his wake.

He helped Irish Brown, now 50, get a car loan when nobody else would. He helped Constance Hawthorne, 62, pay off debts and secure a loan for a $300,000 home. “He taught me about managing money,” she said at his wake. “If it wasn’t for Dean, I wouldn’t have any.”

He moved to Atlanta four years ago as an executive vice president of the Credit Union of Atlanta, and was soon promoted to president and chief executive. He earned about $134,000 last year, tax records show.

He traveled extensively for work, as far as Poland this year. He collected dolls from his travels and kept them in his office. And he continued to dress the part, now that he had it.

“He was an impeccable dresser,” said Rick Hammond, his boss at the South Carolina State Credit Union for several years.

In hindsight, and held up against stereotypes, recollections of Mr. Gaymon’s appearance have invariably led to speculation about whether he had a double life, or a hidden one. But friends and relatives who spoke about him were quick to reel off facts that they believed suggested otherwise: His marriage. His four children. At bars, he would comment on attractive women.

“I raised that young man,” George Gaymon said. “I know it’s not true.” But then he added: “Even if that was the case, is that a reason to shoot to kill?”

Last year, Mr. Gaymon joined a Web site for Montclair High alumni, posted pictures of his family and wrote notes to his old friends. “What’s up Jeffery?” “Karla, how are you?” “Hey John how are you?” When talk of a class reunion began last summer, Mr. Gaymon stepped forward with ideas, like a barbecue or a Circle Line cruise in New York, and took on the job of setting up the party.

“Give me some thoughts,” he wrote.

When the time came, he drove up from Atlanta, arriving at the East Orange home of friends from his old church on Thursday, July 15. He ate breakfast with his hosts the next morning before heading out to Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, a favorite spot from his youth.

In the afternoon, Mr. Gaymon sent a text message to Cheryl Wilcox, 57, who was seeking a loan for a new BMW, and then called the office at 4 p.m. to confirm that the loan had gone through.

“That’s the kind of guy he was,” Ms. Wilcox said.

Two hours later, he was lying in Branch Brook Park, bleeding from a bullet wound.

 

BRANCH BROOK PARK has been a scene for gay cruising at least since the 1980s. The Sheriff’s Office, which patrols the park, would run suspects out of one section, only to find the activity resurfacing in another, leaving behind the telltale flotsam of beer cans and condoms.

Around 2005, adults on a Boy Scout outing saw men engaging in sex acts. One of those adults was Paula T. Dow, who is now New Jersey’s attorney general and was then the Essex County prosecutor. Her office, and the sheriff, launched an undercover operation.

More than 200 people have been arrested since then in Branch Brook and at South Mountain Reservation, also in Essex County, said Sheriff Armando B. Fontoura. He has invited reporters to park operations, where his officers lighted the woods with spotlights that sent half-dressed men running away.

“Go somewhere that is more private,” the sheriff said in 2006. “There are motels that specialize in this kind of thing, very reasonably priced.”

But defense lawyers say the officers are aggressive, seeking out people they perceive to be gay and provoking them. “People don’t grab your crotch if you don’t give them the impression that you want your crotch grabbed,” complained Alexander Shalom, a public defender who has represented several of those arrested and has asked the prosecutor’s office to end the undercover operations.

Officers are rotated in and out of the park, but a few regulars began to recognize one in particular: a man who just sat in his beige car, as if awaiting an invitation. One of those regulars, Jerome Goods, said the man arrested him one day in June, charging him with loitering for the purpose of prostitution. Mr. Goods said he wrote down the name of the officer:

Esposito.

 

EDWARD ESPOSITO might as well have been born with a badge stuck to his chest. His mother, stepfather and brother were all police officers, and he went on to marry one.

He was always handy, and good enough that he could make furniture. At Millburn High School, he ran the lighting programs for student plays and musicals like “The Sound of Music,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

“The stage consumed a lot of his time,” said James White, a shop teacher and technical stage director. “He was often at school until 9 at night and sometimes later.”

He became keenly interested in cars and motorcycles — driving them and fixing them up. “If he saw a Lamborghini or a nice car like that, he’d mention it when we saw each other,” said Michael Riccio, 30, a longtime friend. Over the years, Officer Esposito owned several Ford Mustangs and motorcycles, including a Harley-Davidson and a Yamaha R1 racer.

He embodied any number of New Jersey prerequisites for manhood, both a big “Sopranos” fan and a solid athlete. As an adult, he played hockey for a team that called itself the Mixed Nuts, with jerseys that bore images of cashews and peanuts.

After high school, he moved in the direction of so many Espositos before him, beginning as a security officer at a mall. In 2000 he joined the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office and, two years later, the Essex County sheriff. He has done court security, dispatcher duty, narcotics and detective work, as well as driving and providing security for the county executive, Joseph N. DiVincenzo Jr.

Personnel records provided by the county are thick with commendations for Officer Esposito. As recently as June 29, he received one for helping arrest four drug suspects in Westside Park in Newark.

Gerard Tucci, Officer Esposito’s boss for about two years, described him as even-tempered, “a trouble-free employee.”

“I’m not telling you that he is a zombie, but you don’t want an officer too high all the time or too low all the time,” said Mr. Tucci, who retired as a captain in 2008. “The police officer of the 21st century is no longer the rough-and-tumble person of the 1900s, where you rough up a town and leave like a marshal in the Wild West. You are part of the community and part psychologist, part sociologist, part teacher and part interpreter, someone who has to be sensitive to the immense cultural differences encountered every day.”

Officer Esposito, who earns about $77,000 a year, has two children, ages 6 months and 2 years. “Fatherhood has changed him,” said his old friend Mr. Riccio. “His garage has gone from having motorcycles and cars to being filled with toys, blow-up things and other kids’ stuff.”

Dan Pollock, who has known Officer Esposito since middle school, told friends about 10 years ago that he was gay. “It did not faze him at all,” Mr. Pollock said of Officer Esposito. “I have never seen him hate on anybody. It’s not his style.”

 

WHAT has been publicly released about what happened in the park on July 16 has come from the prosecutor’s office and, given the absence of other witnesses, is based solely on Officer Esposito’s account.

He said he lost his handcuffs during an earlier arrest that day, and was retracing his steps to find them.

Mr. Gaymon, while alone and “engaged in a sex act,” approached Officer Esposito, who was in plain clothes. Officer Esposito pulled out his badge and told Mr. Gaymon that he was under arrest.

“Mr. Gaymon appeared to panic, assaulted the police officer and fled,” the prosecutor’s office said in a news release.

There was a chase across an open area, and the officer cornered Mr. Gaymon in a grassy spot near an algae-coated pond. Mr. Gaymon “threatened to kill the officer,” the prosecutor’s office said. “Mr. Gaymon then lunged at and attempted to disarm the officer while reaching into his own pocket.”

Officer Esposito, “fearing for his life,” fired once.

Eight days later, at his son’s funeral, George Gaymon brought the congregation to its feet during a fiery eulogy that lasted but 30 seconds. “We will bring the circumstance to light!” he shouted from the pulpit of Antisdel Chapel at Benedict College, his son’s alma mater. “We shall never rest until justice is done!”

An awkward alliance has been struck since the shooting: Mr. Gaymon’s family, which has insisted that he was not gay, has been joined by gay groups who have made the shooting a centerpiece of their campaign to stop undercover work in parks. The Sheriff’s Office did suspend the operation, saying it needed to make some adjustments, but beefed up patrols by officers in uniform.

The suspension was “a prudent thing to do when something of this magnitude happens,” Sheriff Fontoura said in an interview. He said he was working with local gay rights groups to curtail lewd activity, adding: “If people comply with the laws, we won’t need this undercover operation anymore.”

Officer Esposito was transferred to the Office of Emergency Management while the prosecutor’s office investigates. He answered a reporter’s knock on his door the week after the shooting and asked for privacy. His lawyer said he would testify before a grand jury, whose review is standard in police shootings, about what happened the evening of July 16.

“We are confident that when this mandatory investigation is concluded,” said the lawyer, Charles J. Sciarra, “all of his actions will be deemed a necessary and justified use of force.”

Two weeks after the shooting, Officer Esposito held a party at his home in Florham Park for his approaching 30th birthday, though Mr. Riccio described the atmosphere as more subdued than celebratory. People talked around the shooting, not addressing it directly; someone asked if Officer Esposito was losing sleep, and he said that he was.

“We were more like, ‘Are you O.K.? Are you doing all right?’ ” Mr. Riccio said. “Ed said that the only time he feels normal is when he is mowing his lawn, like it was a brief escape for him.”

On recent visits to Branch Brook Park, only the odd jogger or stroller-pushing parent walked past the notorious woods. Officers in uniform parked and chatted on the side of the road.

The shooting seems to have done what hundreds of arrests over the years never could: keep men looking for sex out of the park.


Alain Delaquérière, Lois DeSocio, Emily B. Hager, Nate Schweber, Jack Styczynski and Karen Zraick contributed reporting.

    A Fatal Encounter in a Newark Park, NYT, 20.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/nyregion/22newark.html

In 911 Call, Killer of 8 Spoke of Wanting to Kill More

August 5, 2010
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA

The 911 call lasted just more than four minutes, the rare recorded words of a killer moments after he had slain eight people and was about to end his own life.

“This is Omar Thornton, the shooter in Manchester.”

“Yes, where are you sir?” the veteran Connecticut state trooper on the other end of the emergency call responded.

“I’m in the building,” Mr. Thornton said. “Uh, you probably want to know the reason why I shot this place up. This place here is a racist place.”

Seconds later, he added, “I wish I could have gotten more of the people.”

Throughout much of the call, which lasted 4 minutes 11 seconds, the voice of Mr. Thornton, a 34-year-old beer truck driver, was calm but tinged with exhaustion. He seemed eager to explain his bloody rampage, but unwilling to surrender. Having carried out the state’s deadliest attack in recent history on Tuesday at the Hartford Distributors beer warehouse in Manchester, Conn., Mr. Thornton delivered what amounted to a spoken suicide note.

The chilling call, made from somewhere inside the giant warehouse as people lay bleeding and dying and as officers from a half-dozen agencies swarmed the building, provides the first authentic glimpse into Mr. Thornton’s thinking, in his own words.

Mr. Thornton talked about his anger at his bosses and co-workers. He assured the trooper on the phone, more than once, that he was finished killing his colleagues, although he also expressed pleasure at his choice of handguns — “two of my favorites.”

He hinted broadly that he would kill himself before the police found where he was hiding — “When they find me, that’s when everything will be over.” He parried the trooper’s efforts to keep him on the line and finally told him, “Tell my people I love them.”

The recording, first posted Thursday on the Web site of The Hartford Courant, emerged as Mr. Thornton’s girlfriend and family members have maintained that racial harassment at the workplace pushed him over the edge, charges that officials with the company and the local Teamsters union that represented him have steadfastly denied.

Mr. Thornton had been called into a disciplinary hearing the morning of the shootings and was offered a choice of resigning or being fired, after officials accused him of stealing beer along his delivery route. Moments later, he opened fire.

Sometime shortly after 8 a.m., the trooper took the call, and in his own calm tone tried to keep Mr. Thornton on the line. He sympathized with his anger, tried to determine how much firepower the arriving SWAT team might face and repeatedly sought to get him to disclose his exact location.

“They treat me bad over here, they treat all the black employees bad over here,” Mr. Thornton continued in the opening seconds of the conversation. “So I had to take it into my own hands and handle the problem.”

“Yeah, are you armed sir?” the trooper said. “Do you have a weapon with you?”

The call came after a flurry of 911 calls by people inside the building, including at least one of the victims, in the minutes after the first shots rang out. The first call came at 7:25 from Steve Hollander, a company executive who, with graze wounds to his jaw and arm, provided an eerie account of the onslaught to the 911 operator as it was continuing. According to the police and 911 tapes, Mr. Thornton appeared to have shot all of his victims, including two who survived, in a matter of minutes.

In the minutes either before or after his call to 911, Mr. Thornton also called his mother, telling her goodbye and, according to relatives who spoke to her, said that he had killed “the five racists” who had been bothering him.

By the time Mr. Thornton called 911, the police and SWAT teams had cordoned off the building and were sweeping it looking for him.

Mr. Thornton told the trooper, William Taylor, that he had two guns, one on him and one somewhere on the warehouse floor.

“I’m not going to kill anybody else, though.”

The trooper told him, “We’re going to have to have you surrender yourself, somehow, here, and not make the situation any worse, you know what I mean.”

“These cops are going to kill me,” Mr. Thornton said, betraying the first hint of fear.

“No, they’re not,” the trooper assured him. “We’re just going to have to get you to relax.”

“I’m relaxed,” Mr. Thornton answered. “I’m calmed down.”

After a few more exchanges, Mr. Thornton — a man with an unremarkable truck driving career and a life’s worth of financial trouble — returned to his complaints with the company.

“Treat me bad,” he said. “I’m the only black driver they got here. Treat me bad all the time.”

“It’s a horrible situation,” the trooper said. “I understand that.”

Mr. Thornton again told the trooper he was calm and indicated he was aware he was creating what may become a public record of his thinking. He said he just wanted “to tell my story, so you can play it back.”

After a few more exchanges, Mr. Thornton for the first time suggested he planned to kill himself. “Where in the building are you, Omar?” the trooper asked.

“I’m not going to tell you that,” he said, later adding, again, “when they find me, everything will be all right.”

The trooper appeared to change course, seeming to make small talk — asking Mr. Thornton what time he arrived at work that morning — but still trying to glean important details, like how many weapons he had and how much ammunition. Mr. Thornton said he had enough to “take care of business.”

Lt. J. Paul Vance, a public information officer for the Connecticut State Police, said Trooper Taylor was a veteran trained for such situations, but he was not specifically directed to speak to Mr. Thornton as a negotiator.

“That was part of his duties that day; he was in charge of the shift and he just happened to pick up,” Lieutenant Vance said. “He was trying to talk him into surrendering, numerous times.”

At one point, Mr. Thornton appeared as if he would turn himself over to the police.

“Well, I guess, I guess, maybe I’ll surrender,” he said. “Nah, they’ll have to come and get me. Let them come and get me.”

Near the call’s end, Mr. Thornton, who never once throughout the call expressed remorse, seemed to become emotional. He asked the trooper to convey his love to his “people.”

“Got to go now,” he said. After a few more efforts to keep him talking, the line went silent.

“Omar?” the trooper said. “Omar? Omar?”


Liz Robbins contributed reporting.

    In 911 Call, Killer of 8 Spoke of Wanting to Kill More, NYT, 5.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/nyregion/06shooting.html

Amid Mourning, Eerie Details Emerge About Connecticut Shootings

August 4, 2010
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA and CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

When Omar S. Thornton came to the Hartford Distributors warehouse Tuesday morning, his lunch pail contained not one but two 9-millimeter handguns that he often used at a nearby shooting range. According to investigators, Mr. Thornton stashed the lunchbox in a kitchen next to the office where, in minutes, he would learn if he was to be fired from his job as a driver for the Manchester, Conn., company.

Once inside the office, the disciplinary hearing went about as smoothly as such things could, one person who was present said. The company, it turned out, had hired a private investigator, who had been following Mr. Thornton on his delivery route for weeks. They showed him videotape that apparently showed him stealing beer along his route.

Mr. Thornton calmly remarked on the quality of the surveillance camera, signed a resignation letter and asked if he could get a glass of water from the kitchen. He got the guns instead.

He returned to the hallway and killed two of the men who had been in the hearing — one who had been defending his rights, the other who had been pressing the company’s case. And over the next several minutes, at moments walking, at others in full chase, he roamed through the plant and the parking lot, shooting repeatedly.

A day after Connecticut’s deadliest episode of workplace violence in recent history, new information emerged about what happened over those terrible few minutes at the beer distributorship, and what might have prompted the rampage.

Mr. Thornton, investigators and others with knowledge of his assault said, deliberately shot some of his victims — eight fatally — but appeared to purposely spare others before ending the rampage by killing himself.

“He didn’t have a master list saying these are the people he was going to go after, but based upon some of the people that were victims, it’s probably likely that he was targeting some individuals,” said Lt. Chris Davis of the Manchester Police Department. “He passed by many individuals and did not shoot them.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Thornton’s girlfriend expanded on claims he was motivated by anger and frustration at what she said was the racist treatment he had been subjected to at the company.

Officials with the union that represents workers at the plant said Mr. Thornton never mentioned racial harassment but had indeed grown frustrated a year ago at the fact that he had not risen to become a driver of the company’s delivery trucks, and that the local union president, Bryan Cirigliano, had successfully worked to secure that promotion for him.

“Our understanding is Bryan intervened,” the union lawyer Gregg Adler said, adding that Mr. Cirigliano “assisted in getting him that training and he got the training and he became a driver, which is a preferred job for some people.”

On Wednesday, the police gave new details about the chaotic scene at Hartford Distributors, and said that, in addition to the 9-millimeter handguns used in the attack, Mr. Thornton also had a shotgun in his truck. All were legally purchased. He also had three other guns registered in his name. Meanwhile, one of the victims, Louis J. Felder, 50, was buried, and hundreds of residents and workers filled St. Margaret Mary Church in South Windsor for a memorial service.

One of the most detailed and eerie accounts of Mr. Thornton’s attack was captured on the first 911 call to the local police from the plant. Steve Hollander, a company executive who had been in the hearing with Mr. Thornton and survived the attack, made the call despite a bullet wound to his head.

“We need the cops here right away — somebody got shot; I got shot!” a frantic Mr. Hollander told the 911 operator, according to a recording of his call, which came in at 7:25 a.m. “Omar Thornton is shooting people!”

Mr. Hollander continued: “I see him running now. There’s people running. He’s running away right now. He’s shooting at somebody else. He’s still shooting. He’s shooting at a girl. He’s still running after people. He’s not leaving.”

Kristi Hannah, his longtime girlfriend, tried again to largely blame Mr. Thornton’s bosses and union representatives for the massacre because of what she described as racist behavior and a refusal to deal with his repeated complaints about it.

Ms. Hannah, 26, wept on the front porch of her mother’s two-story house in the working-class town of Enfield as she described Mr. Thornton’s problems.

She said Mr. Thornton called her from the men’s room at the plant last fall to let her hear his boss and a colleague he identified as a union representative say they were going to get rid of someone he thought was him, using a racial slur. Ms. Hannah said she could hear the comments clearly because of how they echoed in the bathroom. She said that even though Mr. Thornton brought the case to his union representative several times, the union never followed up.

“I know they pushed them; they did this to him,” Ms. Hannah said. “I know what was said, and I know it was very hurtful, and I know it bothered him a lot.”

She added that Mr. Thornton’s frustration with his job had been growing for many reasons. He had been frustrated by the inability to become a driver quickly; she said workers filled his truck with so many deliveries that he often worked much later than his co-workers, sometimes until 1:30 a.m. Michael Pletscher, a longtime driver at the company, however, said it was normal for the newest drivers to get the worst and longest shifts.

Ms. Hannah’s brother, Ryan Conway, 13, echoed his sister’s sentiments. “Omar was a great guy,” Ryan said. “This thing was brought on by people who don’t treat each other as equals.”

At a news conference outside the Local 1035 union hall a few blocks from the warehouse, Mr. Adler, the union lawyer, and its secretary-treasurer, Christopher Roos, said the shootings had struck at the heart of a small, tight-knit organization. “We have 70 employees,” Mr. Adler said. “We lost 10 percent of our members.”

Mr. Adler dismissed the accusations of racism, saying Mr. Thornton had never filed any complaints with the union, nor did he know of any complaints filed by other employees. “The allegations were news to us,” he said. Mr. Adler said Mr. Thornton appeared to have gone after those who were at his disciplinary meeting. “The other people were at the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.

The Hollander family, which owns the distributorship, issued a statement on Wednesday morning expressing grief for their lost employees and saying that they had been asked by the authorities not to discuss any aspect of the shooting while the investigation was under way.

Mr. Thornton’s family, after spending much of Tuesday defending him, avoided reporters on Wednesday. Wilbert Holliday, Mr. Thornton’s uncle, said that only Mr. Thornton’s mother would speak in the future and that she would decide when the moment was right. “We’re all victims here,” Mr. Holliday said.


Liz Robbins and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

    Amid Mourning, Eerie Details Emerge About Connecticut Shootings, NYT, 4.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/nyregion/05shooting.html

Remembering Lives Lost in a Warehouse Rampage

August 4, 2010
The New York Times
By PATRICK McGEEHAN

MANCHESTER, Conn. — They were burly men who supported their families with an all-American pursuit: getting kegs and cases of Budweiser from the warehouse to store shelves and saloons. Husbands and fathers, even a grandfather among them, they had collectively held their jobs for well over a century at a family-owned business that had been remarkably stable.

They drove trucks and operated forklifts at Hartford Distributors here. A few of them were hanging on for a comfortable retirement, to be cushioned by substantial pensions. Some were still working to cover mortgages and college tuitions to come.

All that came to a bloody end on Tuesday morning, when a fellow beer man who had just resigned under pressure started shooting in the company’s warehouse, the police said. The gunman, Omar S. Thornton, shot 10 men, killing 8 of them, before fatally shooting himself, the police said.

The rampage left gaping voids in suburbs scattered across New England, where the men were known for their devotion to their families and were remembered for the joy they took in cheering on the sons and daughters of their communities from benches and bleachers and dugouts.

Margaret Hudson of South Windsor, Conn., gave voice to a pang felt by many who knew these men as she gestured toward Craig A. Pepin’s nearby house and said, “You can already feel the emptiness of the neighborhood.”

Mr. Pepin, who was 60, had driven beer trucks for three decades. But he was better known in South Windsor, his hometown, as a coach of youth sports.

“He was a father to every kid in South Windsor,” said another neighbor, Pat Wardwell, as Mr. Pepin’s front yard filled with teenagers and young adults who had once been his charges on the town’s ball fields.

In Stamford, Louis J. Felder, a 50-year-old father of three, had been vocal in rooting for his daughter’s basketball team. Mr. Felder was the only member of the company’s management team among those killed. His computer-based systems for managing inventories in warehouses proved so popular with the owners of Hartford Distributors that they hired him as director of operations, according to Reuben Askowitz, a longtime friend who was in Mr. Felder’s wedding party.

Once, when Mr. Felder’s vehicle blew a gasket on the two-hour commute from Stamford to Manchester, the Hollander family, the owners of Hartford Distributors, handed him the keys to a nearly new Audi A8 sedan to replace his damaged heap, Mr. Askowitz recalled.

But the tale most cherished was the one about a young Mr. Felder, who saw his father trapped under a car when a jack gave way. Mr. Felder, still a teenager, but a big one, lifted the car, saving his father from being crushed, Mr. Askowitz recounted.

“That’s why people say he’s Superman,” Mr. Askowitz said. After that feat, he said, who would have imagined that the elder Mr. Felder would attend his son’s funeral.

Mr. Felder’s father was among hundreds who attended his funeral at Congregation Agudath Sholom in Stamford on Wednesday.

His brother, best friend and three teenage children described him as a man of large proportions. He was not just large physically; he was gregarious, fiercely competitive and always in charge, they said.

“He was always pushing me to be better, which he always did out of love,” said Joel Felder, his brother. “Even when he knocked me out.”

Rabbi Elly Krimsky, who led the service, thanked, among others, the politicians and rabbis who had helped return Mr. Felder’s body to his family quickly. On the morning of the shootings, Mr. Felder was with Steve Hollander, an executive vice president, to confront Mr. Thornton with evidence that he had been stealing beer from the company, company and union officials said. After Mr. Thornton agreed to resign, he got two guns that he had brought with him to work and began firing, the police said. Mr. Felder was probably one of his first victims.

The others included Bryan Cirigliano, a rugged former driver who was the shop steward at Hartford Distributors and the president of the Teamsters local representing more than 100 workers there. Mr. Cirigliano had escorted Mr. Thornton to the meeting with the managers, a role he had played, formally and informally, many times, according to John Hollis, who preceded him as president of the local.

Whenever Mr. Cirigliano, whose father and brother had both worked for the company, heard a manager dressing down one of his members, he would intervene, Mr. Hollis said.

“He would immediately stand between the employer and employee and get them to take that issue elsewhere,” he said. “He was very outspoken and very, very sensitive to, as he called them, his union brothers.”

Other victims had been contemplating their retirement from the beer business. Victor James, 60, was planning to quit early next year.

Douglas Scruton, 56, had two years to go before he could leave with 30 years under his belt, said Gary Hoffman, his brother-in-law.

Jerome Rosenstein, 77, who was wounded and was in critical condition Wednesday at Hartford Hospital, was a salesman whose retirement was imminent.

Mr. Scruton, who was operating a forklift in the warehouse when he was fatally shot, was so eager to get away that he and his wife had already moved to a house in New Hampshire, where he lived on weekends. During the week, he stayed with a friend in Manchester, Mr. Hoffmann said.

But wherever he lived, Mr. Scruton was a rabid fan of the University of Connecticut sports teams, as well as the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots, Mr. Hoffman said. He even had a room dedicated to watching sports in his house; Mr. Hoffman dubbed it the Doug-out.

Mr. Scruton was such a fanatic, Mr. Hoffman said, that he would “buy four or five papers each day and just read the sports section and throw the rest away.”

Mr. Hoffman said that Mr. Scruton would not have been party to any of the racial discrimination that Mr. Thornton, who was black, complained to friends about.

“Dougie’s color-blind,” Mr. Hoffman said. “He could never do a racial thing.”

Francis Fazio, another victim, did not live in the suburbs east of Hartford, but about 40 miles away from the warehouse in Bristol, Conn.

Mr. Hollis, the former president of the local, said that the only sports Mr. Fazio talked about at work involved his son.

“He’s a very personable guy, very easy to get to know — in fact, a person you wanted to know,” Mr. Ward said.

For Edwin Kennison Jr., another victim, who lived in a top-floor apartment in East Hartford, the sports passion was attached to the New York Yankees.

A neighbor, Donna Plenzio, said she had told Mr. Kennison, 49: “I don’t even need to watch the games. I know what’s happening just from the noises you make.”

Mr. Kennison, who had a 13-year-old daughter, had intended to get a 2010 Yankees tattoo to add to the two he already had.

Like Mr. Kennison, another of the victims, William C. Ackerman, 51, had an imposing figure that masked a gentle nature, according to Mark Sullivan, who described himself as Mr. Ackerman’s lifelong best friend.

“He would give you his last two cents and the shirt off his back,” Mr. Sullivan said.

“He was a big dude, he was a tough dude, but he was mashed potatoes inside.”

Trying to make sense of the collective loss the victims’ families and communities had suffered, the Rev. Daniel J. Sullivan told a crowd of mourners that overflowed St. Margaret Mary Church in South Windsor on Wednesday evening: “Nothing really can prepare us for this. Not education, not experience can prepare us for such a blow.”


Reporting was contributed by Alison Leigh Cowan, Robert Davey, Elizabeth Maker, Isolde Raftery and Tim Stelloh.

    Remembering Lives Lost in a Warehouse Rampage, NYT, 4.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/nyregion/05vics.html

Beyond Guns: N.R.A. Expands Agenda

July 12, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Fresh off a string of victories in the courts and Congress, the National Rifle Association is flexing political muscle outside its normal domain, with both Democrats and Republicans courting its favor and avoiding its wrath on issues that sometimes seem to have little to do with guns.

The N.R.A., long a powerful lobby on gun rights issues, has in recent months also weighed in on such varied issues as health care, campaign finance, credit card regulations and Supreme Court nominees.

In the health care debate this year, for instance, the N.R.A.’s lobbyists worked with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, to include a little-noticed provision banning insurance companies from charging higher premiums for people with guns in their homes.

The N.R.A. worked out a deal last month exempting itself from a proposal requiring groups active in political spending to disclose their financial donors. Its push this spring for greater gun rights in the District of Columbia served to effectively kill a measure — once seemingly assured of passage — to give the district a voting seat in Congress.

With a push from the N.R.A., a popular bill last year restricting credit card lenders came with an odd add-on: It also allowed people to carry loaded guns in national parks. And the gun lobby put potential supporters of the Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on notice this month that a vote for her would be remembered at the ballot boxes in November.

The N.R.A.’s expanding portfolio is an outgrowth of its success in the courts, Congressional officials and political analysts said. With the Supreme Court ruling last month for the second time since 2008 that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to have a gun, the N.R.A. now finds that its defining battle is a matter of settled law, and it has the resources to expand into other areas.

When the N.R.A. had a narrower range of targets, it relied on a core group of political figures and met with stiffer resistance from vocal gun control advocates in Congress and outside groups. It now has freer rein to leave its mark politically on issues that once seemed out of its reach.

“The last two years have been a disaster for us,” said Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat and a longtime advocate of increased gun control. “A lot of members are just afraid of the N.R.A.”

On Monday, the N.R.A. began broadcasting advertisements urging senators to oppose or filibuster the Kagan nomination. But the group’s top priority is still finding ways to use the Supreme Court ruling in cities, states and courts nationwide to overturn more restrictive gun laws and establish gun rights measures.

N.R.A. officials say they are determined to protect gun rights even if it means using the group’s $307 million budget and membership of more than four million gun owners to influence ancillary issues.

“What you’re seeing is a recognition that support for the Second Amendment is not only a very powerful voting bloc, but a very powerful political force.” Chris W. Cox, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, said in an interview last week at the group’s Washington office, a few blocks from the Capitol.

He pointed to the debate this spring over loosening gun laws in the District of Columbia after a 2008 Supreme Court ruling found the city’s gun ban unconstitutional. At the time, advocates for district voting rights saw their best chance in many years to gain a voting seat in the House, but they abandoned their own proposal after gun rights supporters attached a provision weakening local gun laws.

“I honestly don’t care about D.C. voting rights,” Mr. Cox said of the legislative maneuvering. “I care about reforming D.C. gun laws, and we’re going to use voting rights or any other vehicle at our disposal to address what we consider a blatant disregard for the Constitution.”

The N.R.A. was just as aggressive last month in getting Congressional Democrats to carve out an exemption tailor-made for the group to exclude it from the so-called Disclose Act, requiring disclosure of donors, rather than risk a defeat of the whole bill because of opposition from Republicans and conservative Democrats supportive of gun rights.

“They shot holes in the Disclose Act with such precision and force that it would make an N.R.A. member proud,” said Kenneth Gross, a Washington lawyer who specializes in lobbying issues.

But the group’s muscle has generated tensions with some gun owners themselves, who do not like the idea of the N.R.A. straying into areas outside its core base and aligning itself with Democrats as it broadens its agenda.

The headline on a recent blog post from a rival faction, the Gun Owners of America, singling out the N.R.A.’s exemption from the campaign finance bill, captured the sentiment: “The N.R.A. Sells out Freedom to the Democrats.”

A point of contention on both the left and the right is the N.R.A.’s close working relationship with Mr. Reid, the Senate leader who helped get a number of pro-gun rights measures included in broader bills.

That relationship has led some gun rights supporters to lobby against the idea that the N.R.A. might endorse Mr. Reid in his tough re-election campaign this November in Nevada.

The N.R.A. is not tamping down speculation. While Mr. Cox said the group had not decided on any endorsements, he pointed to what he considered an unattractive alternative if Mr. Reid loses and the Democrats hold power. “I’ll give you four words: Majority Leader Chuck Schumer,” he said.

Mr. Reid, for his part, does not run from his support for the N.R.A. His office noted that he had been a longtime “champion of the Second Amendment.”

One reason for the group’s greater political leverage is that battles in Washington are so closely fought now that powerful interest groups hold more sway even if they can only deliver a handful of votes.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, said in pursuing an ambitious legislative agenda, President Obama — who has been largely silent on gun issues — and Congressional Democrats must either work with the gun lobby or risk losing votes. “They basically end up saying, ‘We’re willing to capitulate to the N.R.A. to get the greater good of whatever passed,’ ” he said.

That approach bothers him and Ms. McCarthy, who first came to politics on a pro-gun-control platform after a gunman with a semiautomatic weapon killed her husband and five others during a rampage on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993.

Ms. McCarthy said the group drew its power from its money — it has donated more than $17.5 million to federal candidates, mostly Republicans, since 1989, and spent millions more in lobbying — and the fear of political retribution.

“I’ve told the Democratic leadership, if you give in to them once, you’re going to see every piece of legislation with a gun amendment added to it,” she said. “But it’s put the leadership in a very difficult position because they know they might not get their bill passed.”

N.R.A. leaders say they plan on broadening their efforts.

“I think we’ve done it better than any organization in the country, to be honest,” said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s executive vice president.

    Beyond Guns: N.R.A. Expands Agenda, NYT, 12.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/us/politics/13nra.html

The Hard Work of Gun Control

July 9, 2010
The New York Times
 

Thirteen days ago, the Supreme Court undermined Chicago’s ban on handguns by applying the Second Amendment to the states, ruling that people have a right to protect their homes with a gun. Four days after that, Chicago passed another handgun restriction that edged right up to the line drawn by the court. And on Tuesday, a group of gun dealers and enthusiasts sued the city again to overturn the new law.

Bullets are flying on city streets, but the vital work of limiting gun use has become a cat-and-mouse game. Beleaguered citizens deserve better from both sides.

We strongly disagreed with the reasoning that led the court to find an individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment, ending handgun bans in Washington, D.C., in 2008 and everywhere else last month. Nonetheless, the law of the land is now that people have a constitutional right to a gun in their home for self-defense.

That right can be limited, the court explicitly said, with reasonable restrictions. But it provided very little guidance as to what is reasonable, leaving lawyers, lawmakers and judges to thrash it out in a bog of lawsuits that could take many years to clear.

Cities and states have a need to be extremely tough in limiting access to guns, but they need to do it with more forethought than went into the Chicago ordinance. Lawmakers there sensibly limited residents to one operable handgun per home, with a strict registration and permitting process. But residents are not allowed to buy a gun in the city. They must receive firearms training, but ranges are illegal in the city. Chicago lawmakers sloughed off on the suburbs the responsibility to regulate sales and training. As a result, more people will travel more miles to transport guns.

The law is likely to draw heightened equal-protection scrutiny from skeptical judges at all levels. Chicago would have been better off allowing gun sales under the strict oversight of the police department, which could then better check the backgrounds and movements of every buyer and seller. The District of Columbia passed a largely similar ordinance last year after its law was struck down by the court. But it permits sales at the few gun shops in the district, and a federal judge upheld that ordinance after it was challenged. It could stand as a model for other cities.

As flawed as the Chicago regulation is, the lawsuit challenging it is entirely over the top. It disputes virtually every aspect of the law as a violation of the Second Amendment and poses ludicrous hypothetical situations to show that everyone needs a gun. “If an elderly widow lives in an unsafe neighborhood and asks her son to spend the night because she has recently received harassing phone calls,” the lawsuit complains, “the son may not bring his registered firearm with him to his mother’s home as an aid to the defense of himself and his mother.” Putting granny in the middle of a neighborhood firefight is preferable to having her simply call the police?

The gun lobby is going to attack virtually every gun ordinance it can find, if only to see what it can get away with now. (Last week, the same lawyers who brought the Chicago and Washington cases sued North Carolina, challenging a law that prohibits carrying weapons during a state of emergency.)

Lawmakers need not match the lobby’s obduracy. Cities and states should counter with tough but sensible laws designed to resist legal challenges and keep gun possession to a minimum.

    The Hard Work of Gun Control, NYT, 9.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/opinion/11sun1.html

Utah’s Gun Permit Popular With Nonresidents

July 5, 2010
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

James Roe, a 64-year-old computer consultant from rural Pennsylvania, spent a recent Saturday in a Pittsburgh suburb learning about riflings, hangfires and powder charges. The gun safety class was for people seeking a concealed-firearm permit in Utah, some 1,500 miles away. Never mind that Mr. Roe has not been to Utah in 20 years and has no plans to visit anytime soon.

Like thousands of other gun owners who will most likely never set foot in Utah, Mr. Roe wants a permit there for one reason: It allows him to carry his semiautomatic .45-caliber pistol in 32 other states that recognize or have formal reciprocity with Utah’s gun regulations.

“I think that all states should be as broad based with reciprocity and as careful as the state of Utah is,” said Mr. Roe, who wants the option of taking his handgun with him when he visits his son in Ohio, both for protection and for target practice. (Ohio does not honor Pennsylvania’s firearm permit.)

With the Supreme Court ruling last week that the Second Amendment’s guarantee of an individual’s right to bear arms applies to state and local laws, Utah is a popular player in Americans’ efforts to legally obtain firearms. The state is issuing what has become the permit of choice for many gun owners.

Fifteen years after the Utah Legislature loosened rules on concealed firearm permits by waiving residency and other requirements, the state is increasingly attracting firearm owners from throughout the country. Nearly half of the 241,811 permits granted by the state are now held by nonresidents, according to the Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification, which administers the permits.

In 2004, Utah received about 8,000 applications for the permits. Last year, 73,925 applications were submitted — with nearly 60 percent coming from nonresidents.

Laws for carrying concealed firearms vary widely by state, as do issuing standards for permits. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut do not honor other states’ permits. Some states, like Florida, allow nonresidents to qualify for permits. Utah stands out because its permit is relatively inexpensive and is broadly accepted, and the requisite safety class can be taken anywhere.

By passing the class and the background check, and paying a $65.25 fee, the applicant receives what many consider to be the most prized gun permit in the country. Permits are good for five years and cost $10 to renew.

Some Second Amendment proponents argue that people with permits are more likely to be law abiding because they have undergone at least some form of background check.

“The spirit of self-defense should not stop at a state’s border,” said Clark Aposhian, a Utah gun lobbyist who sits on the state’s Concealed Firearm Review Board, which helps regulate the permitting process. “Not once has there been a pattern of problems with Utah permit holders in other states.”

But Utah’s permit program has its critics. Peter Hamm, a spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, asserted that Utah’s policy was dangerous because many states were lax in submitting felony and mental health records to the federal database used for background checks.

“I think it’s absolutely shameful and ludicrously irresponsible to say that anybody anywhere who wants one of our concealed-carry permits, and thus will be able to carry legally in dozens of states, can just log on to our Web site and pay 60 bucks and that’s all she wrote,” Mr. Hamm said.

As more people have turned to Utah for permits, the demand for instructors who teach Utah’s gun safety class in other states has increased. Of the 1,097 instructors certified by Utah, 706 are in other states. Advertisements for classes held throughout the country appear widely on the Internet.

Another source of contention is that the class does not require any actual shooting. One could conceivably obtain a Utah permit without ever having fired a gun. Nevada and New Mexico recently stopped honoring Utah permits because the class does not meet its live-fire requirements.

“Residents of other states should be aware that people who have a Utah concealed-weapon permit may not have actually fired a weapon,” said Dee Rowland, chairwoman of the Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah. “I think that would be quite shocking to members of the public.”

Supporters of Utah’s policy counter that the state’s 50-page curriculum on gun safety, and background checks that are updated every 24 hours, ensure that the system is safe.

“We teach passive defense in Utah,” said State Representative Curtis Oda, a Republican from Clearfield.

“We have no idea what could have happened had there been an armed defender at Columbine and Virginia Tech,” Mr. Oda said, “but we know with absolute certainty what happens when there’s not.”

    Utah’s Gun Permit Popular With Nonresidents, NYT, 5.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/us/06guns.html

The Court: Ignoring the Reality of Guns

June 28, 2010
The New York Times

About 10,000 Americans died by handgun violence, according to federal statistics, in the four months that the Supreme Court debated which clause of the Constitution it would use to subvert Chicago’s entirely sensible ban on handgun ownership. The arguments that led to Monday’s decision undermining Chicago’s law were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody.

This began two years ago, when the Supreme Court disregarded the plain words of the Second Amendment and overturned the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, deciding that the amendment gave individuals in the district, not just militias, the right to bear arms. Proceeding from that flawed logic, the court has now said the amendment applies to all states and cities, rendering Chicago’s ban on handgun ownership unenforceable.

Once again, the court’s conservative majority imposed its selective reading of American history, citing the country’s violent separation from Britain and the battles over slavery as proof that the authors of the Constitution and its later amendments considered gun ownership a fundamental right. The court’s members ignored the present-day reality of Chicago, where 258 public school students were shot last school year — 32 fatally.

Rather than acknowledging Chicago’s — and the nation’s — need to end an epidemic of gun violence, the justices spent scores of pages in the decision analyzing which legal theory should bind the Second Amendment to the states. Should it be the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, or the amendment’s immunities clause? The argument was not completely settled because there was not a five-vote majority for either path.

The issue is not trivial; had the court backed the immunity-clause path championed by Justice Clarence Thomas, it might have had the beneficial effect of applying more aspects of the Bill of Rights to the states. That could make it easier to require that states, like the federal government, have unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials, for example, or ban excessive fines.

While the court has now twice attacked complete bans on handgun ownership, the decision left plenty of room for restrictions on who can buy and sell arms.

The court acknowledged, as it did in the District of Columbia case, that the amendment did not confer “a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” It cited a few examples of what it considered acceptable: limits on gun ownership by felons or the mentally ill, bans on carrying firearms in sensitive places like schools or government buildings and conditions on gun sales.

Mayors and state lawmakers will have to use all of that room and keep adopting the most restrictive possible gun laws — to protect the lives of Americans and aid the work of law enforcement officials. They should continue to impose background checks, limit bulk gun purchases, regulate dealers, close gun-show loopholes.

They should not be intimidated by the theoretical debate that has now concluded at the court or the relentless stream of lawsuits sure to follow from the gun lobby that will undoubtedly keep pressing to overturn any and all restrictions. Officials will have to press back even harder. Too many lives are at stake.

    The Court: Ignoring the Reality of Guns, NYT, 28.6.2010,  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/opinion/29tue1.html

Justices Say Gun Rights Apply Locally

The New York Times
June 28, 2010
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court held Monday that the Constitution's Second Amendment restrains government's ability to significantly limit "the right to keep and bear arms," advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.

By a narrow, 5-4 vote, the justices signaled, however, that less severe restrictions could survive legal challenges.

Writing for the court in a case involving restrictive laws in Chicago and one of its suburbs, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment right "applies equally to the federal government and the states."

The court was split along familiar ideological lines, with five conservative-moderate justices in favor of gun rights and four liberals opposed. Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority.

Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the home.

That ruling applied only to federal laws. It struck down a ban on handguns and a trigger lock requirement for other guns in the District of Columbia, a federal city with a unique legal standing. At the same time, the court was careful not to cast doubt on other regulations of firearms here.

Gun rights proponents almost immediately filed a federal lawsuit challenging gun control laws in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill, where handguns have been banned for nearly 30 years. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says those laws appear to be the last two remaining outright bans.

Lower federal courts upheld the two laws, noting that judges on those benches were bound by Supreme Court precedent and that it would be up to the high court justices to ultimately rule on the true reach of the Second Amendment.

The Supreme Court already has said that most of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights serve as a check on state and local, as well as federal, laws.

Monday's decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that they would eventually fall.

Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully binding on states and cities "limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values."

    Justices Say Gun Rights Apply Locally, NYT, 28.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/28/us/AP-US-SupremeCourt-Guns.html

Man Shoots 4 People and Himself at California Restaurant

June 19, 2010
The New York Times
By SARAH WHEATON

A man rode a bicycle up to a taco chain restaurant in San Bernardino, Calif., on Saturday afternoon and shot his stepdaughter and three members of her family, leaving two of them dead, before fatally turning one of his two handguns on himself.

Lt. Jarrod Burguan of the San Bernardino Police Department said the suspect was the stepfather of one of the victims, a 29-year-old woman. She was shot multiple times and was in critical condition. Her husband, 33, was pronounced dead at the scene, and her 6-year-old son died at the hospital. Her 5-year-old son is in “very, very critical” condition at a local hospital, Lieutenant Burguan said.

The suspect, whom the police identified as Jimmy Schlager, 56, arrived at the Del Taco restaurant on a bicycle at around 1 p.m. on Saturday and walked directly up to the family’s table, witnesses told the authorities. He was armed with two handguns and said something to the family before firing multiple shots at them and then shooting himself in the head. Mr. Schlager was still alive when the police arrived, Lieutenant Burguan said, but he died about three hours later at a hospital.

While the motive remains unclear, authorities believe “there’s a domestic connection,” Lieutenant Burguan said. Witnesses offered the police “very vague” accounts of what Mr. Schlager said to the family, Lieutenant Burguan said: “Something to the effect of, ‘Well, what do you think of me now?’ “

The police did not release the names of the victims. Lieutenant Burguan said Mr. Schlager had a “pretty extensive criminal history,” dating to 1972, with charges including driving under the influence of alcohol, property theft and assault with a deadly weapon. Someone — not one of the victims — took out a restraining order against him in 2006. Lieutenant Burguan said he was not aware of any complaints from the stepdaughter.

    Man Shoots 4 People and Himself at California Restaurant, NYT, NYT, 19.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/us/20calif.html

One Dead in Coney Island Shooting

June 9, 2010
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and COLIN MOYNIHAN

One person was killed and two others were critically injured in a shooting in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn on Wednesday night, the police said.

The shooting took place shortly after 9 p.m. close to the Coney Island Houses, near West 35th Street and Surf Avenue, which is about a block away from the beach.

The shooting apparently took place after a dispute involving a man and a 16-year-old girl. Witnesses said the girl and the man were talking in a courtyard when the girl’s 19-year-old brother came out of his family’s ground-floor apartment and tried to separate them, which started an argument.

Shots rang out moments later, and the mother of the two teenagers, who had just stepped out of the apartment, was struck in the head. The father of the woman identified her as Victoria Rogucki and said she was the mother of seven children, including 2-year-old twins.

“She was trying to keep them from fighting,” said the man, who identified himself only as Charles. “She got in the middle of it. She was an innocent bystander.”

The authorities said one man was shot in the neck and a second man was shot in the chest. Neither man was identified. It was unclear which victim had died.

“It was terrifying,” said one neighbor, Linnia Harrison, who was in her 10th-floor apartment with her 12-year-old daughter when the gunfire erupted. “I told my daughter to get on the floor.”

It was unclear if the gunman was still at large. But just minutes after the shooting, several people involved in a car accident near the crime scene were detained. Witnesses said that a silver sports car smashed into a sport-utility vehicle near 16th Street.


Ángel Franco contributed reporting.

    One Dead in Coney Island Shooting, NYT, 9.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/nyregion/10coney.html

Bias Seen in ‘Police-on-Police’ Shootings

May 26, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

A governor’s task force studying mistaken-identity confrontations between police officers found that racial bias, unconscious or otherwise, played a clear role in scores of firearms encounters over the years, most significantly in cases involving off-duty officers who are killed by their colleagues.

The task force, formed last June by Gov. David A. Paterson to examine confrontations between officers and the role that race might have played, conducted what it said it believed was the first “nationwide, systematic review of mistaken-identity, police-on-police shootings” by an independent panel outside of law enforcement.

“There may well be an issue of race in these shootings, but that is not the same as racism,” said Zachary W. Carter, a former United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who served as the task force’s vice chairman. “Research reveals that race may play a role in an officer’s instantaneous assessment of whether a particular person presents a danger or not.”

The report by the task force found that 26 police officers were killed in the United States over the past 30 years by colleagues who mistook them for criminals. It also found that it was increasingly “officers of color” who died in this manner, including 10 of the 14 killed since 1995.

More specifically, in cases involving a victim who was an off-duty officer, the task force reported that 9 of the 10 officers killed in friendly fire encounters in the United States since 1982 were black or Latino, including Omar J. Edwards, a New York City officer who was fatally shot in Harlem last May by an on-duty colleague, and Officer Christopher Ridley, an off-duty Mount Vernon officer shot and killed by at least three uniformed Westchester County officers in White Plains in January 2008.

The last killing of a white off-duty officer by an on-duty colleague in a mistaken-identity case in the United States happened in 1982.

“In short, there are many issues besides race present in these shootings, and the role that race plays is not simple or straightforward,” according to the report, which was delivered to Mr. Paterson this week.

But in searching for trends, the report said the conclusion of the task force was clear: “Inherent or unconscious racial bias plays a role in ‘shoot/don’t-shoot,’ decisions made by officers of all races and ethnicities.”

The task force, headed by Christopher E. Stone, the Guggenheim professor of criminal justice at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, made nine recommendations — directed at local, state and federal levels of government, including the United States Justice Department, he said.

It commended the New York Police Department for initiating a program, in the wake of the Edwards shooting, to test officers for unconscious racial bias, something Mr. Stone said he hoped would be replicated across the country.

Laurie O. Robinson, assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs in the Justice Department, said the recommendations were something it would “review and consider very seriously.” She said she had shared them with colleagues.

The recommendations are aimed at “blunting” any unconscious racial bias, Mr. Carter said. They call for establishing protocols for off-duty conduct, increasing testing for racial bias among officers and improving how police departments manage such encounters when they occur within their ranks. One focused on prosecutors, calling for them to disclose publicly as much detail as possible about such encounters, and early on, to avoid having facts disappear in a fog of grand jury secrecy.

The 67-page report outlined the facts of the Edwards and Ridley shootings, as well as some of the 24 other fatal encounters since 1981. The task force spoke with current and former officers. It drew on three public hearings held around the state — in Albany in November and in Harlem and in White Plains in December. It identified several trends in reviewing the cases and in analyzing existing research on the topic.

Most of the 26 victims were male. Of the 10 off-duty victims, 8 worked in plainclothes, and 6 worked undercover.

Of the 26 fatal shootings, 5, including Officer Ridley’s case, involved an off-duty officer who came across a crime in progress and moved to help other officers or a civilian, the report found. In five other cases, including the Edwards shooting, an off-duty officer was a crime victim and then tried to make an arrest or to take police action, the report found. The only other New York City case the group studied involved Officer Eric Hernandez, who was off duty when he was shot by a colleague who responded to a 911 call and saw him in the aftermath of a brawl at a White Castle restaurant in 2006.

In all but 2 of the 26 fatal shootings of officers that were examined, the victim was holding a gun and had it “displayed” when he or she was shot, the report found. Indeed, it noted, “many of the victim officers with guns displayed reportedly failed to comply with the commands of challenging officers who ordered them to freeze or to drop their weapons.”

The report added, “This failure to comply is often simply the rapid turning of the head and body to determine the source of the verbal command.” The report referred to this reaction as “reflexive spin.”

The authors acknowledged that training for such instances was difficult because of the “rush of adrenaline” involved.

Deaths from friendly fire encounters — representing a small fraction of such confrontations — can tear at police officers and departments. In their wake, minority officers often second-guess their career choices, or are peppered with questions by relatives or friends, particularly those who have had difficult experiences with law enforcement, the study found.

A department’s recruitment efforts, in turn, can be hampered.

“Departments that had never imagined that such a tragedy would occur within their ranks find themselves unprepared to handle the inevitable emotion and trauma, sometimes leading to a loss of credibility and respect, not only with the public, but also among sworn members of their own law enforcement agencies,” the report’s executive summary said.

Yet, if patterns hold, such fatalities will afflict departments this year, next year and “so on into the future,” the summary said.

    Bias Seen in ‘Police-on-Police’ Shootings, NYT, 26.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/nyregion/27shoot.html

Angry Father, Devoted Son, and Gunfire

May 23, 2010
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN and JOHN HUBBELL

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — It was here, in this blue-collar town of frame houses and good-natured biker bars, that Jerry Ralph Kane Jr. began his fight against what he regarded as the illegitimate corporations he believed had usurped the government.

That fight ended in spectacular fashion Thursday in West Memphis, Ark., just across the Mississippi River from Memphis, leaving Mr. Kane, his 16-year-old son, Joseph, and two local police officers dead.

Mr. Kane and Joseph shot the officers who stopped their white van on Interstate 40, then died in a firefight with other law enforcement officials in a Wal-Mart parking lot, wounding a sheriff and his deputy, the authorities said. A newspaper photograph showed Joseph, dead on a traffic island, the bullet-riddled van behind him.

It was only the culmination — the inevitable culmination, some who knew Mr. Kane said — of a struggle that began here in Springfield.

This is where Mr. Kane made a show of cutting his long grass with a pair of scissors when police officers came to his property to enforce city codes, a neighbor recalled. This is where he demanded to be paid $100,000 a day in gold or silver, “the only legal form of payment in the Constitution,” when he was sentenced to community service for traffic violations. This is where Mr. Kane’s brother has a plaque on his porch with a fake gun affixed to it. “We ain’t dialin’ 911,” it says.

And this is where Mr. Kane drew his son, who the authorities said participated in the shooting, into his web of conspiracy theories and suspicion of authority. By age 9, Joseph, who was home-schooled, could recite the Bill of Rights from memory and carried a realistic toy gun everywhere he went, Sheriff Gene A. Kelly of Clark County said.

In recent years, Joseph went along, as did the family’s two dogs, when Mr. Kane crisscrossed the country delivering seminars purporting to divulge methods of forestalling foreclosures. The pair appeared in matching black or white suits, and Joseph sometimes chimed in with legal factoids.

“He could recite the Constitution,” Mr. Kelly said of Joseph, whom he met when Mr. Kane paid a visit to his office in 2004. “He could recite the right to bear arms. You could tell that the child had been taught not to trust law enforcement.”

Donna Lee Wray — who described herself as Mr. Kane’s wife of three months (she said she and Mr. Kane had been married “in the eyes of God” and had not believed they should pay the government for a marriage license) — said Federal Bureau of Investigation agents had told her it was Joseph, not his father, who fired at the police officers who stopped the van on a stretch of freeway known for drug trafficking and crime.

“The F.B.I. said that Jerry was at the driver’s side of the van in the back, talking to the two officers peaceably, and that 16-year-old Joe comes out guns ablazing,” she said in a telephone interview on Sunday from her home in Clearwater, Fla. F.B.I. officials declined to confirm that report, and Ms. Wray questioned why no videotape of the shooting had been released.

When the police caught up to the van 90 minutes later, the father and son began shooting as soon as Sheriff Dick Busby of Crittenden County and a deputy pulled up, said Mr. Busby, who was shot in the shoulder. “The driver jumped out with a high-powered rifle, and the other got out on the right side,” he said. “They both started at the same time.”

Mr. Kane was the son of a security guard. Right after graduating from high school, he made the first of three unsuccessful races for the City Commission in Springfield, according to The Springfield News-Sun. His campaign ended when he was arrested on charges that he had stolen beer from a railroad boxcar, The News-Sun reported.

He became a trucker, joining an industry that is dominant here, and married a nurse, Hope Drummond. In 1993, they had Joseph, and two years later, they had a daughter, Candy, who died as an infant, Ms. Wray said. Candy’s death, attributed to sudden infant death syndrome, became a defining moment for Mr. Kane, Ms. Wray said, when his lawyer told him he had to allow an autopsy even though he objected.

“He couldn’t comprehend how a corporation could have more rights than a father,” she said. “That’s where he started asking questions.”

In recent years, Mr. Kane repeatedly attracted the attention of the Springfield authorities.

In 2003, he tried to buy property at a sheriff’s sale in exchange for an I.O.U., Sheriff Kelly recalled. In 2004, he was charged with assault after he shot a passing teenager in the leg with a pellet or BB gun without provocation, according to a police affidavit that said he had a “mental history.”

After Mr. Kane visited the sheriff’s office to complain about the judge who had sentenced him to community service, Mr. Kelly became so concerned that he warned the area’s law enforcement officers to beware of Mr. Kane.

“I thought anyone who encountered him could possibly have a violent confrontation,” the sheriff said.

In 2002 and again in 2004, property owned by the Kanes was foreclosed on, according to court records, and the health department sued him twice. In 2007, Hope Kane died of complications related to pneumonia.

By then, Mr. Kane was already involved in what the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which study hate groups, call the Patriot movement or the “sovereign citizen movement,” extreme groups that believe the government has no legitimate authority. The van Mr. Kane was driving was registered to the House of God’s Prayer at 132 W. Main Street, in New Vienna, Ohio, a vacant building that is owned by an aging white supremacist.

J. J. MacNab, an insurance analyst and expert on tax and financial frauds who has closely watched sovereignty groups for a decade, said she had found 141 vehicles registered to that address under different names, including several church names, indicating that people were probably using it as a way to shelter property from the I.R.S.

Mr. Kane believed the true government had been supplanted by elaborately deceptive profiteers who were harassing him, Ms. Wray said. “He thought it was piracy, just attaching tickets and bills and charges to people when there was no injury,” she said.

To evade the control of these entities, he gave up his driver’s license, ending his career as a trucker, she said.

“Jerry was not antigovernment in the least,” she said. “They just had a big desire to protect people from these private, for-profit corporations that may as well be Blackwater.”

Jim Jenkins, a former mortgage broker in Seattle who attended one of Mr. Kane’s seminars in April, said that Mr. Kane had been largely congenial, but that his anger had flared when he recalled a traffic stop earlier that month in New Mexico. Mr. Kane was arrested and jailed on charges of driving while his license was suspended or revoked and concealing his identity.

“He was very upset for quite a while about the New Mexico stop,” Mr. Jenkins said, “because he didn’t believe you need a license to travel in the nation’s highways. That that is a right of every American, not a privilege.”

In a clip from an Internet radio show, Mr. Kane accused the New Mexico officers of kidnapping him from a “Nazi checkpoint” and said he had done a background check on the arresting officer. “I found out where he lives, his address, his wife’s name,” he said.

In a video of one of his seminars, which was removed from YouTube over the weekend, Mr. Kane responded to reports of a zealous I.R.S. agent by twice suggesting that she be found and beaten up. Joseph said, “If you pay for the bat, I’ll take care of the problem.”

Mr. Kane also referred to a earlier problem with alcohol, saying: “I don’t want to kill anybody but if they keep messing with me, that’s what it’s going to come down to. And if I have to kill one, then I’m not going to be able to stop. I just know it, I mean, I have an addictive personality.”

Ms. MacNab said Mr. Kane had first appeared on her radar about four years ago as a promoter of the debt-elimination program run by the Dorean Group, whose leaders have since been convicted of fraud and conspiracy.

Two years ago, she said, he resurfaced as the leader of his own seminars. Seminars of this type usually teach that each person has a real self and a “corporate self” that is a fabrication of the government, and that banks cannot legitimately lend money that belongs to their depositors.

“It’s mumbo jumbo; it’s magic words; it’s abracadabra,” Ms. MacNab said.

Ms. MacNab said that Mr. Kane had competitors far more successful than he, whose seminars might command audiences of 250 people at a time.

At Mr. Kane’s last seminar in Las Vegas a week ago, for which he charged $300 per person, only six people attended.


Kathleen A. Bennett contributed reporting from St. Petersburg, Fla., and Lynn Waddell from Clearwater, Fla.

    Angry Father, Devoted Son, and Gunfire, NYT, 23.5.2010http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24arkansas.html

Sharpton: Detroit Girl's Death Is 'Breaking Point'

May 22, 2010
Filed at 2:28 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DETROIT (AP) -- Hundreds of people turned out Saturday for the funeral of a 7-year-old Detroit girl killed in a police raid and were told they must help stop the violence that has recently swept the city.

Civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton gave the eulogy for Aiyana Stanley-Jones, who died Sunday when a police bullet stuck her in the neck.

Sharpton questioned whether officers in the city's affluent suburbs would throw a stun grenade into a house before entering as Detroit officers did. But he said that while he could criticize Detroit police and political leaders, he'd rather offer a broader message to the community.

''I'd rather tell you to start looking at the man in the mirror. We've all done something that contributed to this,'' he said referring to Aiyana's death.

He called on the congregation gathered at Second Ebenezer Church to help stop violence in the city, saying, ''This is it. This child is the breaking point.''

The top half of Aiyana's coffin was open before the service at the 3,000-seat contemporary Baptist church. A flower arrangement shaped like a princess' crown and bearing Aiyana's name was on a stand behind the casket.

Anthony Givens, 55, of Detroit, said he knew Aiyana's family and last saw the child when he paid a brief visit on Mother's Day.

''She was playing, joyful, laughing with her brothers,'' Givens said.

He said he's been disappointed in the past week by the publicity and sharp disagreement over how Aiyana died. Police have said an officer's gun accidentally fired inside the house after he was jostled by, or collided with, her grandmother. A lawyer for Aiyana's family has sued and claims the shot was fired from the porch after the grenade was lobbed through a window.

''It's a very sad thing,'' Givens said. ''I think they should concentrate on burying the young lady instead of all this ruckus.''

(This version CORRECTS that the flower arrangment was on a stand behind the casket. )

    Sharpton: Detroit Girl's Death Is 'Breaking Point', NYT, 22.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/22/us/AP-US-Police-Search-Girl-Killed.html

Tragedy in Detroit, With Reality TV Crew in Tow

May 21, 2010
The New York Times
By MARY M. CHAPMAN and SUSAN SAULNY

DETROIT — The house where Aiyana Stanley-Jones lived on the East Side here is quiet now, a makeshift memorial of teddy bears and balloons on the porch where the police lobbed a stun grenade through the front window last Sunday. They were looking for a 34-year-old homicide suspect.

But Aiyana, 7, asleep for the night on a sofa under the window, died from a bullet to the neck.

“Soon as they hit the window, I hit the floor and went to reach for my granddaughter,” said a distraught Mertilla Jones at a news conference after Aiyana’s death. “I seen the light leave out her eyes. I knew she was dead. She had blood coming out of her mouth. Lord Jesus, I ain’t never seen nothing like that in my life.”

But there is a good possibility that others eventually will see it: On that chaotic night, the Detroit police were being shadowed by a camera crew from a reality television show, “The First 48,” on the A&E cable network. And even if the night’s macabre events are never shown on television, they will almost certainly be viewed in a courtroom, since Aiyana’s family has filed suit against the Detroit Police Department, alleging gross negligence.

Even in Detroit, where deadly violence can seem routine, Aiyana’s killing has transfixed the city, leaving many questioning what they see as heavy-handed tactics by the police — particularly the use of the so-called flash-bang grenade on a Sunday night in a residence where children were known to live.

Beyond Detroit, the incident is raising a larger question in this age of reality TV: Does the presence of TV crews affect how well police officers do their jobs?

“Those cameras can influence the behavior of what’s already a very dangerous and unpredictable job,” said Brian Willingham, a laid-off Flint, Mich., police officer and author of "Soul of a Black Cop.”

Laurie Ouellette, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Minnesota who specializes in reality television, says cameras even affect what type of police calls are shown. “There is evidence that they do tend to go into lower-income neighborhoods and are less likely to be shown policing affluent white suburban spaces,” she said. “They want a particular kind of drama. They want the money shot.”

The original “Cops” series made its debut more than 20 years ago, but police shows are the hottest genre in reality television, Ms. Ouellette said, mainly because they are cheap — a perfect product for a time of rapid proliferation of cable channels in need of content but ever-shrinking production budgets.

Some police departments participate because they see the shows as positive publicity and community outreach. And proponents of such reality shows say that the presence of the cameras works to police the police.

But, Ms. Ouellette said, “Just like anyone on ‘American Idol’ or ‘Survivor’ goes on and performs a role, we can imagine that police are performing a role based on what they’ve seen, on the endless televised representations of real police officers. It would be unrealistic to think that they don’t think of themselves in terms of what the expectations are for these shows.”

In particular, Thomas Loeb, a lawyer in Farmington Hills, Mich., who specializes in police misconduct cases, said there may be a correlation between the use of stun grenades and reality shows.

According to the Detroit police the loud, disorienting devices are used on a case-by-case basis. But some criminal justice experts say their use in the routine execution of a search warrant is unusual.

“I think they’re showboating for the camera,” Mr. Loeb said, referring to the police using the grenades on reality shows.

The Michigan State Police are investigating Sunday’s shooting, and Representative John Conyers Jr., a Democrat who represents Detroit, has asked the Department of Justice to intervene.

In a letter sent to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., Mr. Conyers asked, “If entertainment cameras are present, are there particular steps that should be taken to ensure that focus remains on sound police practice and not television drama?”

A spokesman for A&E, Dan Silberman, declined to comment on the case. But the network’s footage could be crucial.

The Detroit police dispute much of what Aiyana’s family and their lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, say happened on the night of the shooting. (Mr. Fieger is best known for representing Jack Kevorkian.)

The Jones family contends that the shot that killed Aiyana was fired from outside the house, and that the police eventually caught the homicide suspect, Chauncey L. Owens, at a different address within the duplex. But according to the police, a stray bullet hit Aiyana after at least one officer had entered the first-floor flat and came into contact with Ms. Jones, Aiyana’s grandmother.

The police have been unclear about exactly where Mr. Owens was captured, whether it was in Aiyana’s family’s apartment or not. Mr. Owens was charged on Wednesday with first-degree murder in the killing of a Detroit teenager.

“This investigation should have been over Monday morning,” Mr. Fieger said. “You have videotape that you know about, which depicts what happened.”

No one knows for sure what members of the camera crew got, since they were outside and are not speaking. But their work may show whether the shot in question was fired from outside.

Television and film crews are not allowed inside suspects’ home by federal law.

Robert J. Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University who specializes in television and popular culture, said: “The film will reveal certain empirical details, but the idea of ‘what happened?’ is a lot more complicated. The video may not be definitive.”

Mr. Fieger said that someone — a man he would not identify — showed him some of the footage, and that the tape confirmed the family’s version of events. (Mr. Fieger said he did not have the tape, and did not make a copy.)

Michigan State Police have the video.

The Detroit police chief, Warren C. Evans, said, “This case has been a human tragedy at every possible level.” He declined to comment on the possibility that officers were affected by the presence of a cable network crew.

At Maison’s Fine Foods, a diner, patrons were abuzz with talk of the circumstances surrounding Aiyana’s death. Larry Chatman, a retiree, took a critical view of the Police Department’s actions, especially the use of the flash-bang grenade.

“Why was it necessary to throw that in there in that situation?” he said. “The cops bungled this one real bad, all the way around.”

Aiyana’s funeral is Saturday, and the Rev. Al Sharpton will deliver the eulogy.



Mary M. Chapman reported from Detroit, and Susan Saulny from Chicago.

    Tragedy in Detroit, With Reality TV Crew in Tow, NYT, 21.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/22detroit.html

Man Who Shot Police Had Antigovernment Views

May 21, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — An antigovernment Ohio man who had had several run-ins with the police around the country was identified Friday as one of two people suspected of gunning down two officers during a traffic stop in Arkansas.

The Arkansas State Police on Friday identified the pair — killed Thursday during an exchange of gunfire with the police — as Jerry R. Kane Jr., 45, of Forest, Ohio, and his son Joseph T. Kane, believed to be 16.

About 90 minutes before the shootout with the police, Sgt. Brandon Paudert, 39, and Officer Bill Evans, 38, were killed with AK-47 assault rifles after stopping a minivan on Interstate 40 in West Memphis, Ark., the authorities said.

Jerry Kane, who used the Internet to question federal and local government authority over him, made money holding debt-elimination seminars around the country. He had a long police record and had recently complained about being arrested at what he called a “Nazi checkpoint” near Carrizozo, N.M., where court records showed he spent three days in jail on charges of driving without a license and concealing his identity before posting a $1,500 bond.

Sheriff Gene Kelly of Clark County, Ohio, told The Associated Press on Friday that he had issued a warning to officers on July 21, 2004, saying that Mr. Kane might be dangerous to law enforcement officers. Sheriff Kelly said he had based his conclusion on a conversation the two men had had about a sentence Mr. Kane had received for some traffic violations.

Sheriff Kelly said that Mr. Kane complained in 2004 about being sentenced to six days of community service for driving with an expired license plate and no seat belt, saying that the judge had tried to “enslave” him. Mr. Kane had added that he was a “free man” and had asked for $100,000 per day in gold or silver.

“I feel that he is expecting and prepared for confrontations with any law enforcement officer that may come in contact with him,” Sheriff Kelly wrote in his warning to officers.

On an Internet radio show, Mr. Kane expressed outrage about his New Mexico arrest. “I ran into a Nazi checkpoint in the middle of New Mexico where they were demanding papers or jail,” he said. “That was the option. Either produce your papers or go to jail. So I entered into commerce with them under threat, duress and coercion, and spent 47 hours in there.”

Mr. Kane said he planned to file a counterclaim alleging kidnapping and extortion. “I already have done a background check on him,” he said of the arresting officer. “I found out where he lives, his address, his wife’s name.”

Mark Potok, who directs hate-group research at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Mr. Kane had not been in the group’s database before Thursday. But he said that was not surprising, given the “explosive growth” in the antigovernment movement in recent years. With 363 new groups in 2009, there are now 512, Mr. Potok said.

JJ MacNab, who has testified before Congress on tax and financial schemes, said that she had been tracking Mr. Kane for about two years and that his business centered on debt-avoidance swindles.

Mr. Potok said such schemes were common in the movement, whose members consider themselves sovereign citizens.

“He basically promised them they would never have to repay their mortgage or credit card debt,” Ms. MacNab said.

    Man Who Shot Police Had Antigovernment Views, NYT, 21.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/22arkansas.html

Police: Ohio Man, Son Killed Ark. Officers

May 22, 2010
Filed at 4:31 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- An Ohio man's resentment of authority and run-ins with the law was enough for a local sheriff to warn that he may be dangerous if confronted by law enforcement. Years later, it appears the sheriff was right: The man and his teenage son fatally shot two Arkansas police officers during a traffic stop and were later killed in a shootout, police said.

Jerry Kane Jr., 45, of Forest, Ohio, and his son Joseph Kane, believed to be 16, were identified by police Friday as the gunmen who used AK-47 assault rifles to attack West Memphis police Sgt. Brandon Paudert, 39, and Officer Bill Evans, 38.

Father and son had been pulled over in a minivan on Interstate 40 in West Memphis on Thursday, and they were killed about 90 minutes later during a shootout in a Walmart parking lot.

Jerry Kane, who had a long history with police, used the Internet to question federal and local governments' authority over him and held debt-elimination seminars around the country. He recently complained about being busted at a ''Nazi checkpoint'' near Carrizozo, N.M., where court records show he spent three days in jail before posting a $1,500 bond on charges of driving without a license and concealing his identity.

Sheriff Gene Kelly in Clark County, Ohio, said he issued a warning to law enforcement about Kane in July 2004, after Kane said a judge tried to ''enslave'' him when he was sentenced to six days of community service for driving with an expired license plate and no seat belt. Kane claimed he was a ''free man'' and asked for $100,000 per day in gold or silver, Kelly said.

''After listening to this man for almost 30 minutes, I feel that he is expecting and prepared for confrontations with any law enforcement officer that may come in contact with him,'' Kelly wrote in his warning to officers.

Kelly told The Associated Press on Friday that he had been ''very concerned about a potential confrontation and about his resentment of authority.''

On an Internet radio show, hosted on a website that lets amateurs create their own shows and live discussions, Kane expressed outrage about his New Mexico arrest.

''I ran into a Nazi checkpoint in the middle of New Mexico where they were demanding papers or jail,'' he said. ''That was the option. Either produce your papers or go to jail. So I entered into commerce with them under threat, duress and coercion, and spent 47 hours in there.''

Kane said he planned to file a counterclaim alleging kidnapping and extortion against those involved in his arrest and detention. Kane also said he had an officer sign a document that said the officer must pay for using Kane's name.

''I am now putting together an invoice for him for approximately $80,000 in gold for the eight times he used my name,'' Kane said on the radio show. ''I already have done a background check on him. I found out where he lives, his address, his wife's name.''

Mark Potok, who directs hate-group research at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Kane had not been in the group's database before Thursday. But he said that was not surprising, given the ''explosive growth'' in the anti-government movement in recent years. With 363 new groups in 2009, there are now 512, Potok said.

Members of so-called patriot groups don't recognize the authority of the U.S. government and consider themselves sovereign citizens.

JJ MacNab, a Maryland-based insurance analyst who has testified before Congress on tax and financial scams, said she had been tracking Kane for about two years and that his business centered on debt-avoidance scams.

Potok said such scams are common in the sovereign citizen movement.

''He basically promised them they would never have to repay their mortgage or credit card debt,'' MacNab said.

Kane's website showed he held one of his seminars in Las Vegas 15-16 and that he was due to appear in Safety Harbor, Fla., May 28-29. His website Friday asked that donations be sent to an address in Clearwater, Fla., to help his family.

At that Florida address, a woman, speaking through the front door, told an AP reporter to leave the property when he knocked and identified himself. Two bicycles were in front of the unkempt, single-story home and exercise equipment was on the porch. A sign on the front door read: ''No visitors. This means you. Thank you for understanding.''

A woman who answered the door at the home of Kane's mother, Patricia Holt of Marysville, Ohio, also told an AP reporter to leave and said she had no comment. She did not identify herself.

------

Associated Press Writers Jill Zeman Bleed in Little Rock; Lisa Cornwell in Springfield, Ohio; Sue Holmes in Albuquerque; Mitch Stacy in Clearwater, Fla.; and JoAnne Viviano and Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

    Police: Ohio Man, Son Killed Ark. Officers, NYT, 22.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/22/us/AP-US-Arkansas-Officers-Shot.html

2 Dead, 4 Wounded in Oakland Shooting

May 9, 2010
The New York Times
Filed at 3:46 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) -- Oakland police say two men are dead and four women have been hospitalized after at least one gunman opened fire in an unlicensed after-hours nightclub.

Investigators say the shooting took place around 2:45 a.m. Sunday in a warehouselike building that been converted into a club offering music, dancing and drinking.

When officers arrived, they found the two men dead at the scene. One of the four women hit by gunfire was considered badly wounded.

Police did not know the condition of the three other women.

Police have not released any names, or determined a motive for the shooting.

    2 Dead, 4 Wounded in Oakland Shooting, NYT, 9.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/09/us/AP-US-After-Hours-Shooting.html

Editorial

The Gun Lobby’s Long Shadow

May 7, 2010
The New York Times

While the rest of the nation comes to grips with fresh concerns about terrorism, domestic and foreign, Congress is wrapped up in the peculiar obsessions of the gun lobby — most of which are certain to make Americans less safe in their homes and on the streets.

Congress, for example, is cowering before the gun lobby insistence that even terrorist suspects who are placed on the “no-fly list” must not be denied the right to buy and bear arms. Suspects on that list purchased more than 1,100 weapons in the last six years, but Congress has never summoned the gumption to stop this trade in the name of public safety and political sanity.

Legislation to close this glaring threat continues to languish with little promise of enactment because a bipartisan mass of lawmakers fear retribution by the gun lobby’s campaign machine. Firsthand pleas this week from New York City’s mayor and police commissioner — testifying after the attempted Times Square bombing attributed to a suspect who was also carrying a legally obtained gun — showed no sign of budging a timorous Congress.

It is a sign of the gun lobby’s growing confidence that if feels free to keep up the pressure, public and private, after the near-disaster in New York. Normally, the lobby goes quiet for a decent interval after a particularly heinous crime occurs.

To the contrary, Senator John McCain and other members of the gun lobby’s cohort are pressing for legislation to strip local taxpayers in Washington of such basic gun controls as owner registration and a ban on semiautomatic battlefield rifles — laws already upheld by the courts. The gun lobby cued Congress to take another run at scuttling the city’s gun controls after previously using the issue to stymie the district’s hopes to at last have a full-fledged voting representative in the House.

If Capitol supporters of the National Rifle Association agenda dared to check reality outside their windows they would confront the district’s alarm over the four dead and five wounded citizens who fell six weeks ago in a spray of bullets from a semiautomatic weapon. Instead, the gun lobby aims at allowing residents to buy weapons and ammunition in lightly policed markets in Virginia and Maryland.

To protect its clout in the political arena, the gun lobby is challenging legislation needed to contain an expected flood of unregulated attack ads in this year’s federal elections. Corporations, unions and advocacy groups were given this laissez-faire spending freedom in a misguided decision by the Supreme Court. An urgent countermeasure to require public disclosure of these groups’ stealthy money sources and donors is being opposed “in its present form” by the N.R.A.

It would be folly for Congress to create disclosure exemptions for the N.R.A. or any other advocacy heavyweight by distinguishing them from corporate and union organizations under the bill. Disclosure would be rendered a joke by a flood of exemptions. Congress must hold the line and let the public in on the looming campaign machinations. It should not allow groups on the right or left to spend freely from the political shadows.

    The Gun Lobby’s Long Shadow, NYT, 6.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/opinion/07fri1.html

Pregnant Woman Shot to Death on West LA Street

May 6, 2010
Filed at 3:38 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A pregnant woman sitting in a parked car in a West Los Angeles residential area was shot to death Wednesday by a gunman who pulled up in a sport utility vehicle and opened fire on a group of people, police said.

''The car drove up, shots rang out,'' Capt. Evangelyn Nathan said. ''When shots rang out, they started ducking and running. When the shots were over, they discovered our victim had been hit.''

Witnesses saw the gunman in the South Robertson area approach 26-year-old Jana Collins, her husband and friends and shot her in the head, police said. Witnesses said the suspect jumped into the SUV and fled. There were no reports of any arrests.

Officer Sara Faden said the woman, 26-year-old Jana Collins, was taken in a private car to Kaiser Permanente Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. She was about four months pregnant, and the fetus also died.

Police Lt. Tony Carranza told the Los Angeles Times that investigators believe the victim's husband, a suspected gang member, was the intended target. He had stepped out of the vehicle shortly before Collins was shot.

KNBC-TV said Collins worked at Starbucks, had recently gotten married and was the mother of two children.

    Pregnant Woman Shot to Death on West LA Street, 6.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/06/us/AP-US-Pregnant-Woman-Killed.html

Yale Doctor Killed at Home, Police Say

April 26, 2010
Filed at 6:52 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BRANFORD, Conn. (AP) -- A doctor was charged Monday with fatally shooting a Yale University doctor and firing at the victim's pregnant wife after a history of confrontations with the victim and other colleagues that led to his dismissal from a New York hospital.

Branford police said 44-year-old Lishan Wang is charged with murder, attempted murder and firearms offenses in the fatal shooting Monday of Vajinder Toor outside his home. Police say Wang, a Chinese citizen from Beijing who was last known to be living in Marietta, Ga., also fired at Toor's wife, but she was not struck.

Wang is being held on $2 million bond. A message was left with an attorney representing him in a civil lawsuit.

Toor worked at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in New York before joining Yale. Police are investigating whether Toor and the gunman had a dispute on the job, using information provided by the victim's wife, said Lt. Geoffrey Morgan.

''We're following a hypothesis that the victim and the assailant had some sort of negative interaction at a previous employer,'' Morgan said, adding that police do not expect to make additional arrests.

Wang and Toor were involved in a confrontation a few years ago at Kingsbrook after Wang left his post at the intensive care unit and was not reachable for a few hours, according to a hospital employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing murder investigation. The employee said Toor reprimanded him and that Wang threatened Toor in front of other employees.

Wang filed a federal discrimination lawsuit last year against the hospital. He talks about a heated exchange with his supervisor in the hospital's residency program, ''Dr. Vajinder,'' in May, 2008 after Vajinder accused him of ignoring pages and calls from hospital staff.

''An hour after this heated discussion, Dr. Vajinder then accused Dr. Wang of threatening his safety by using hostile body language, although he did not summon security to assist him,'' Wang's lawsuit states.

It is one of several allegations of anger and behavioral problems that Wang acknowledges he was cited for while in the program. In the lawsuit, he said he was unfairly labeled excitable, emotional and unable to control his anger.

Wang was suspended with pay on May 22, 2008, and notified by letter that the hospital had decided to propose firing him. He was told by the union that the hospital would only allow him to remain employed if he sought disability leave for mental impairment. He was fired in July.

On Monday, Toor was walking in the parking lot toward his car at Meadows condominiums, miles from the Ivy League campus, shortly before 8 a.m. when he was shot multiple times.

Wang was taken into custody on a traffic stop nearby after residents provided police with details about the suspect and his vehicle, police said.

Toor was a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Medicine who was working with the infectious disease section of Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Yale Police Chief James Perrotti sent an e-mail to the university community -- which was shaken in recent months by the killing of a graduate student in her lab building -- saying Branford police told him the crime was not a random act and was unrelated to Yale.

Hersh Arora, a neighbor and family friend, said Toor's wife, Parneeta, had just waved goodbye to her husband and closed the door when she heard gunshots and ran outside. She saw her husband lying on the ground, saw a man with a gun and asked what he was doing.

The man started firing at her, so she hid behind a car, Arora said. A neighbor tried to perform CPR on Toor, Arora said.

The couple have a 3-year old-son, and Parneeta is five months pregnant, Arora said.

''She can't even cry in front of the kid,'' Arora said. ''She's trying to be brave.''

Wang's lawsuit claims injuries resulting from discrimination based on race, national origin and disability, and accuses the hospital of retaliation against him for investigating, disclosing and opposing the discrimination.

Wang disputes evaluations by human resources staff at Kingsbrook that he had behavioral problems and anger issues, saying he received favorable evaluations.

''Additionally, during the time period when some of his supervisors and KJMC Human Resources began to falsely characterize Dr. Wang as mentally impaired and suffering from 'anger' issues, Dr. Wang scored well on the ''interpersonal skills sections of his evaluations with no mention of emotional or anger-related problems,'' the lawsuit states.

Another doctor, Dr. Gealda Xavier, claimed Wang had yelled at her during a phone call. Wang responded by accusing the hospital of racism.

''Dr. Xavier is not Chinese and Dr. Wang had previously complained to his supervisors that she had treated him in a rude and abusive manner. Nothing was done to address Dr. Wang's complaint. However, the committee sided with Dr. Xavier, who is not Chinese, and inappropriately attributed the perceived problems with Dr. Wang's behavior to unspecified 'family problems,'' the lawsuit states.

------

Associated Press writer Stephanie Reitz and Pat Eaton-Robb in Hartford contributed to this report

    Yale Doctor Killed at Home, Police Say, NYT, 26.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/26/us/AP-US-Yale-Doctor-Killed.html

Man Who Killed 2 in Mich. Town Gets Life Sentence

April 22, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:16 a.m. ET

CORUNNA, Mich. (AP) -- A trucker has been sentenced to life in prison for the fatal shootings of an abortion protester and a businessman in a small Michigan community.

Harlan Drake apologized before being sentenced Thursday in Shiawasee County Circuit Court, about 20 miles west of Flint. The life term was automatic under Michigan law.

A daughter and granddaughter of anti-abortion activist James Pouillon (POOL'-yuhn) spoke about their loss. The judge also heard from a brother of the second victim, Mike Fuoss (FOOSE).

    Man Who Killed 2 in Mich. Town Gets Life Sentence, NYT, 22.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/22/us/AP-US-Activist-Killed-Mich.html

Two Dead in Tennessee Hospital Shooting

April 19, 2010
The New York Times
By DERRICK HENRY

A gunman fatally shot a woman and injured two others before killing himself outside a hospital in Knoxville, Tenn., the police said.

The attack happened at about 4:30 p.m. near the patient discharge area of the Parkwest Medical Center, the police said. One woman died at the scene and the other two were taken to The University of Tennessee Medical Center’s trauma unit for treatment. At least one of the surviving victims was in critical condition at the hospital and was scheduled to undergo surgery, police officials said.

Investigators on Monday night were still trying to determine a motive and considered it a random act of violence.

“It does not appear that he had any history with the victims or the medical center,” said Darrell DeBusk, the spokesman for the Knoxville City Police Department. The police and Parkwest officials said that all three victims were current or former employees of the hospital.

Mr. DeBusk said the women were shot outside the doors of the patient discharge area. Right after that, the man turned the pistol on himself, he said. It was unclear how many shots were fired.

Officials late Monday night identified the dead woman as Rachel Wattenbarger, 40. The surviving victims were identified as Ariane Guerin, 26, and Nancy Chancellor, 32. The name of the suspect was withheld pending notification of next of kin, officials said.

After the shooting, members of a SWAT team searched the hospital to ensure there was not another attacker inside, the police said.

“We had to make sure he was acting alone,” Mr. DeBusk said. After the security sweep, the hospital was reopened, except in the immediate area where the shooting happened. Mr. DeBusk said it appeared that the gunman carried only one pistol but declined to describe its make and caliber.

On Monday night, investigators were conducting interviews with possible witnesses to help determine if the suspect had entered the hospital at any time before the shooting.

    Two Dead in Tennessee Hospital Shooting, NYT, 19.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/us/20tennessee.html

4 Shot Near Times Square Amid Reports of Unruly Crowds

April 5, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

Four people were shot in three episodes in Midtown Manhattan, and the police said they arrested 54 people as rowdy crowds roamed the area in the waning hours of Sunday and early Monday in what has become something of a violent Easter Night ritual.

No one had been arrested in any of the shootings — two near Times Square and the other near Pennsylvania Station — by midmorning Monday. The four people who were shot were in stable condition at hospitals in Manhattan, the police said.

The police said they had assigned extra manpower to Times Square on Sunday evening because they were concerned about crowds leaving the New York International Auto Show, which opened on Friday at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, on 11th Avenue near West 34th Street.

While the trade show itself has not experienced problems, the spillover of revelers into Times Square following the show on Easter Sunday has led to mini riots in recent years. In 2006, a teenager was stabbed; the following year, a teenager was slashed in the arm.

“There’s a lot of troublemakers that go to the auto show each year,” said Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, “and sometimes they get in fights afterward.”

City and state police traditionally beef up security at the show on key days, including Easter, in part to watch for signs of gang activity, including members showing colors. But auto show officials said there were no signs of gang activity on Sunday.

“Our crowd was very family oriented yesterday,” said Chris Sams, a spokesman for the show, “lots of baby strollers.”

The auto show closed at 7 p.m., and it was not clear whether the trouble later in the night involved people who had migrated from the Javits Center toward Times Square and Penn Station.

The police said the first episode was reported at 12:08 a.m. It involved a 21-year-old man who was shot in the leg on Eighth Avenue near West 41st Street. The man, who was not identified, was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center. The police said he was in stable condition.

Bystanders said they heard two shots; the police said preliminary reports indicated that only one shot had been fired.

Officers began searching trash cans and stopping pedestrians to check their bags as they walked along West 41st Street near Eighth Avenue. West 41st was closed between Seventh and Eighth Avenues into early Monday morning as investigators canvassed the block. Other streets, from 42nd Street to 46th Street, were closed to pedestrians along the block east of Eighth Avenue for about an hour after the shooting. One police officer said the closings were intended to encourage the crowds in the Times Square area to go home.

The police said they made a number of arrests as the night went on. One stemmed from a fight near the Swatch store at Broadway and West 45th Street.

The second shooting was reported 20 minutes after the first. The police said that a woman at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and West 51st Street had been shot in the face by a BB gun. She was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where she was said to be in stable condition. No arrests have been made in that shooting.

The third shooting, at 2:08 a.m., was reported at Seventh Avenue and West 34th Street, near Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. The police said that a 19-year-old woman there was shot in the arm and an 18-year-old was shot in the leg.

Investigators’ efforts to figure out what had happened stranded some people for a while as they tried to leave Midtown. At the corner of Eighth Avenue and 41st Street, a New Jersey couple on their first date waited for the police to allow them to pick up their car, parked near where the police had set up yellow tape.

“I was trying to take her out on our date,” said John Mejia, 23, of Union City. “We just want to go the movies. Now because of the shooting, we’re not going to the movies.”

Several feet from the couple, the police had detained three men, whose backs were against the glass walls of the Schnipper’s Quality Kitchen restaurant on the ground floor of The New York Times building at 620 Eighth Avenue, the red neon sign illuminating the brims of their baseball caps. Across the street, a tourist described what she had witnessed. “We heard two pops,” said Misty Hart, 35, of Atlanta. “Then we saw a whole mess of cops.” She said officers rushed out of the Port Authority Bus Terminal and intercepted three men who were running along West 41st Street. She recalled seeing a loud mass of hundreds of young people chanting and parading down a Broadway sidewalk just before midnight. Her family decided to take a detour along Eighth Avenue to avoid them, she said, but they ended up running into them again.

Ms. Hart was in town with her family, including her daughter Lakin, who had just turned 17.

“Happy birthday,” she shouted to her daughter, who shrugged and smiled as a horse and buggy cart padded up Eighth Avenue and cabs began to speed by again.


Derrick Henry and Ray Rivera contributed reporting.

    4 Shot Near Times Square Amid Reports of Unruly Crowds, NYT, 6.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/nyregion/06shootweb.html